Synaptic sampling: A connection between PSP variability and uncertainty explains neurophysiological observations

Understand

When an action potential is transmitted to a postsynaptic neuron, a small change in the postsynaptic neuron's membrane potential occurs.

• These small changes, known as a postsynaptic potentials (PSPs), are highly variable, and current models assume that this variability is corrupting noise.
• In contrast, we show that this variability could have an important computational role: representing a synapse's uncertainty about the optimal synaptic weight (i.e.
• the best possible setting for the synaptic weight).