The Log-dynamic Brain: How Skewed Distributions Affect Network Operations

Overview

Journal Nat Rev Neurosci

Specialty Neurology

Date 2014 Feb 27

PMID 24569488

Citations 390

Authors

Gyorgy Buzsaki

Kenji Mizuseki

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

We often assume that the variables of functional and structural brain parameters - such as synaptic weights, the firing rates of individual neurons, the synchronous discharge of neural populations, the number of synaptic contacts between neurons and the size of dendritic boutons - have a bell-shaped distribution. However, at many physiological and anatomical levels in the brain, the distribution of numerous parameters is in fact strongly skewed with a heavy tail, suggesting that skewed (typically lognormal) distributions are fundamental to structural and functional brain organization. This insight not only has implications for how we should collect and analyse data, it may also help us to understand how the different levels of skewed distributions - from synapses to cognition - are related to each other.

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