Multi-structure Cortical States Deduced From Intracellular Representations of Fixed Tactile Input Patterns.

The brain has a never-ending internal activity, whose spatiotemporal evolution interacts with external inputs to constrain their impact on brain activity and thereby how we perceive them. We used reproducible touch-related spatiotemporal sensory inputs and recorded intracellularly from rat (Sprague-Dawley, male) neocortical neurons to characterize this interaction. The synaptic responses, or the summed input of the networks connected to the neuron, varied greatly to repeated presentations of the same tactile input pattern delivered to the tip of digit 2. Surprisingly, however, these responses tended to sort into a set of specific time-evolving response types, unique for each neuron. Further, using a set of eight such tactile input patterns, we found each neuron to exhibit a set of specific response types for each input provided. Response types were not determined by the global cortical state, but instead likely depended on the time-varying state of the specific subnetworks connected to each neuron. The fact that some types of responses recurred indicates that the cortical network had a non-continuous landscape of solutions for these tactile inputs. Therefore, our data suggest that sensory inputs combine with the internal dynamics of the brain networks, thereby causing them to fall into one of the multiple possible perceptual attractor states. The neuron-specific instantiations of response types we observed suggest that the subnetworks connected to each neuron represent different components of those attractor states. Our results indicate that the impact of cortical internal states on external inputs is substantially more richly resolvable than previously shown.

Absence of Repetitive Correlation Patterns Between Pairs of Adjacent Neocortical Neurons in vivo.

Neuroanatomy suggests that adjacent neocortical neurons share a similar set of afferent synaptic inputs, as opposed to neurons localized to different areas of the neocortex. In the present study, we made simultaneous single-electrode patch clamp recordings from two or three adjacent neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) of the ketamine-xylazine anesthetized rat in vivo to study the correlation patterns in their spike firing during both spontaneous and sensory-evoked activity. One difference with previous studies of pairwise neuronal spike firing correlations was that here we identified several different quantifiable parameters in the correlation patterns by which different pairs could be compared. The questions asked were if the correlation patterns between adjacent pairs were similar and if there was a relationship between the degree of similarity and the layer location of the pairs. In contrast, our results show that for putative pyramidal neurons within layer III and within layer V, each pair of neurons is to some extent unique in terms of their spiking correlation patterns. Interestingly, our results also indicated that these correlation patterns did not substantially alter between spontaneous and evoked activity. Our findings are compatible with the view that the synaptic input connectivity to each neocortical neuron is at least in some aspects unique. A possible interpretation is that plasticity mechanisms, which could either be initiating or be supported by transcriptomic differences, tend to differentiate rather than harmonize the synaptic weight distributions between adjacent neurons of the same type.