Topic: synaptic organization

Mark Harnett presents work on how synaptic organization, nonlinear dendritic processing, and neuronal activity patterns interact to support computation, flexibility, and learning in the adult mammalian neocortex. The Brain and Cognitive Sciences colloquium is followed by a reception.

Emerging studies based on the functional and structural imaging of the whole human brain have proposed a brain organization model in which there are highly and non-highly connected nodes. Nevertheless, the detailed analysis of the synapses is crucial to better understand the human brain organization.Here, we have performed detailed three-dimensional ultrastructural analyses in some highly connected (Brodmann areas 21, 24 and ventral and dorsal portions of 38) and non-highly connected (Brodmann areas 3b, 4 and 17) brain regions from human control autopsies with short-postmortem delay. Using thr