STDP: spiking, timing, rates and beyond

Leon N Cooper

doi:10.3389/fnsyn.2010.00014

Abstract

STDP: spiking, timing, rates and beyond

Highlights

One possibility was that synaptic modification followed the famous Hebbian rule: “When an axon in cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly and persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency in firing B is increased” (Hebb, 1949)
That Hebbian modification could be only part of the story, since synapses would grow in strength without bound
The primary question became: Can we find any evidence for synaptic modification? If so, what is its form? Further, what is its cellular and molecular basis – the cellular and molecular basis for learning and memory storage?

Summary

Introduction

One possibility was that synaptic modification followed the famous Hebbian rule: “When an axon in cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly and persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency in firing B is increased” (Hebb, 1949). In order for the information required for Hebbian modification to be available locally, I conjectured that it must be propagated backwards (by depolarization or spiking in the direction opposite to the usual information flow) from the cell body to each of the synapses, see Figure 1 (Cooper, 1973). One way to attack these questions lay in the experimental observation that many cortical neurons are selective.

Results

Conclusion