Sensitivity to perturbations in vivo implies high noise and suggests rate coding in cortex

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It is well known that neural activity exhibits variability, in the sense that identical sensory stimuli produce different responses, but it has been difficult to determine what this variability means. Is it noise, or does it carry important information – about, for example, the internal state of the organism? We address this issue from the bottom up, by asking whether small perturbations to activity in cortical networks are amplified. Based on in vivo whole-cell recordings in rat barrel cortex, we find that a perturbation consisting of a single extra spike in one neuron produces ~28 additional spikes in its postsynaptic targets, and we show, using simultaneous intra- and extra-cellular recordings, that a single spike produces a detectable increase in firing rate in the local network. Theoretical analysis indicates that this amplification leads to intrinsic, stimulus-independent variations in membrane potential on the order of ±2.2 - 4.5 mV – variations that are pure noise, and so carry no information at all. Therefore, for the brain to perform reliable computations, it must either use a rate code, or generate very large, fast depolarizing events, such as those proposed by the theory of synfire chains – yet in our in vivo recordings, we found that such events were very rare. Our findings are consistent with the idea that cortex is likely to use primarily a rate code.