Researchers Discover New Item in Brain's Computational 'Toolkit'

A new study reveals the ability of the microscopic branches of neurons called dendrites to perform the brain's necessary computations when determining the orientation of one's surroundings.

The report, published in the journal Nature, challenges the long held belief that this kind of processing requires an array of neurons working in tandem.

The researchers, who hailed from the University of College London, the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge and the University of North Carolina, observed the neurons found in the parts of a mouse brain responsible for breaking down visual cues.

They accomplished the highly complex task of making electrical and optical recordings directly from the dendrites of neurons in the brain while the brain was both intact and processing visual information. In doing so, they revealed that visual stimulation results in precise electrical signals that are "tuned to the properties of the visual stimulus," according to the press release outlining the discovery.

"This work shows that dendrites, long thought to simply 'funnel' incoming signals towards the soma, instead play a key role in sorting and interpreting the enormous barrage of inputs received by the neuron," said senior author Michael Hausser. "Dendrites thus act as miniature computing devices for detecting and amplifying specific types of input."

Knowing this, the researcher explained, offers greater insight into the powerful computing equipment the brain represents -- and not only the brains of mice.

"This new property of dendrites adds an important new element to the 'toolkit' for computation in the brain," Hausser said. "This kind of dendritic processing is likely to be widespread across many brain areas and indeed many different animal species, including humans."