Abstract
How information circulates in the brain was the subject of a heated debate lasting a decade or more among anatomists in the closing years of the last century. One camp argued that neural tissue consisted of a continuum, a syncytium, with no discernible functional units while the opposing view held that the brain consisted of discrete units, the nerve cells, communicating through point-to-point contacts that Sherrington dubbed synapses. Although in principle both views can be supported, in practice the majority of rapid communication occurs via specific point-to-point contacts, at either chemical and electrical synapses. Ephaptic transmission refers to nonsynaptic, electrical interactions between neurons. While such interactions do occur, for instance, among adjacent, parallel axons across the extracellular space, they are, by their very nature, neither very strong among any one pair of processes nor very specific. Their functional significance—if any—is currently not known, and we will not discuss them here (Traub and Miles, 1991; Jefferys, 1995). In the beginning chapter, we introduced the action of fast, chemical synapses. Given their importance, we will now return to this topic in greater depth. We first overview the pertinent biophysical events underlying chemical synaptic transmission and some of the vital statistics of synapses before we come to the mathematical treatment of synaptic input. In the last section, we will summarize our knowledge of electrical synapses and their computational role. Most typically, a synapse consists of a presynaptic axonal terminal and a postsynaptic process that can be located on a dendritic spine, on the trunk of a dendrite, or on the cell body. Figure 4.1 shows some examples of synapses among cortical cells as seen through a high-powered electron microscope. It is not easy at first to identify the synapses amid all the curved, irregular, and densely packed structures making up the neuronal tissue. In a number of locations, such as the retina or the thalamus, a synaptic connection is made between two dendrites, rather than between an axon and a dendrite. These synapses are called dendrodendritic synapses; they are believed to be relatively rare in the adult cortex. Most synapses are small and highly specialized features of the nervous system. As we will see, a chemical synapse converts a presynaptic electrical signal into a chemical signal and back into a postsynaptic electrical signal.