From Neuron to Brain: Statistical Physics of the Nervous System

Abstract

A common experimental neuroscience protocol is to record the single neuron activity in response to repeated stimulus presentations and analyze how this activity encodes for stimulus properties. Neurons are embedded in a large network and their response properties depend on the dynamical state of the network. I discuss how brain chemicals-neu-romodulators-can dynamically change the coherence and frequency content of network activity; how the network coherence affects the neu-ronal response to current injection and how this can form the neural correlate for an important computation-gain modulation-that the brain performs.