Information Processing and Synaptic Transmission

Abstract

The brain is probably the most complex machinery for information processing we can imagine. The amount of data it manages is extremely huge. Any conscious or unconscious event both internal and coming from the environment needs to be perceived, elaborated, and responded with an appropriate action. Moreover, the high-level activities of mind require the connection of logical elaboration, the relationship with past experience (memory), and the transfer of information among different areas of the brain participating to the elaboration of the thought. Almost all brain illnesses or even simple defaults can be related to a corruption of the basic system which manage information in the brain. The main actors in transferring and managing information are the synapses, and then the understanding of the brain information processing cannot disregard the full understanding of the synaptic functionality. In the present chapter, by using as example the most common type of the brain synapse (the glutamatergic synapse), we will present the basic mechanism of synaptic transmission stressing some of the most relevant mechanisms which regulate the transfer and management of information.

The Origins of Variability in The Responses of The Glutamatergic Synapse

“…The EPSC produces a postsynaptic variation of the membrane potential called Excitatory Post Synaptic Potential (EPSP). If we assume that a presynaptic spike is the elementary bit of information ("a single letter") in a sequence of spikes representing a byte of information ("a whole word") then e single EPSP represents the single bit of information translated into the synaptic code [18].…”

“…The position of the vesicle with respect to the central axes of the synapse also play an important role [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. As for the number of molecules in the vesicle, also the position is considered a mechanism of modulation of the postsynaptic response of stochastic origin [18,25,[28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

Prediction of the peak shear strength of the rock joints with artificial neural networks

“…If the sum of the signals arriving at an individual neuron via synapses is large enough, the ignition of an individual neuron occurs. This means that this neuron sends a signal to its output, which is transmitted through the synapses to other neurons (Jain et al, 1996, Maio & Santillo, 2020.…”