Why Neurons Have Thousands of Synapses, A Theory of Sequence Memory in Neocortex

Understand

Neocortical neurons have thousands of excitatory synapses.

• It is a mystery how neurons integrate the input from so many synapses and what kind of large-scale network behavior this enables.
• It has been previously proposed that non-linear properties of dendrites enable neurons to recognize multiple patterns.
• In this paper we extend this idea by showing that a neuron with several thousand synapses arranged along active dendrites can learn to accurately and robustly recognize hundreds of unique patterns of cellular activity, even in the presence of large amounts of noise and pattern variation.