Dendritic Computation and the Neural Code

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If one connects loudspeakers to an electrode implanted in brain cells, one would hear a rough, crackling and apparently unstructured sound. Is this noise a reflection of intrinsic imprecisions of an organic form of information processing or, rather, is it the result of an unknown and perhaps highly optimized way of encoding information? At the center of neuroscience research lies this problem of neural coding. It has become clear that peripheral nerves code information streaming from the senses in their spiking rate. Neurons within the hierarchical structure of the neocortex, however, constantly combine information of two different natures: bottom-up information coming more directly from the senses and top-down information coming from internal sources. Therefore, we propose a simple reformulation of the neural coding problem and ask the general question: How can a single population of neurons encode two streams of information simultaneously? Recent experimental evidence point to a pivotal role of dendrites in answering this question.