Information encoded in volumes and areas of dendritic spines is nearly maximal across mammalian brains.

ABSTRACT: Many experiments suggest that long-term information associated with neuronal memory resides collectively in dendritic spines. However, spines can have a limited size due to metabolic and neuroanatomical constraints, which should effectively limit the amount of encoded information in excitatory synapses. This study investigates how much information can be stored in the population of sizes of dendritic spines, and whether it is optimal in any sense. It is shown here, using empirical data for several mammalian brains across different regions and physiological conditions, that dendritic spines nearly maximize entropy contained in their volumes and surface areas for a given mean size in cortical and hippocampal regions. Although both short- and heavy-tailed fitting distributions approach [Formu

SUBMITTER: Karbowski J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10721930 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature