Dynamic synapse: Harnessing the computing power of synaptic dynamics

A major unresolved issues in neuroscience is the emergence of functional capability from underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms. The concept of a dynamic synapse is extended to provide a formalism to incorporate synaptic mechanisms into a general scheme of neural information processing: A synapse is composed of two distinct functional units, presynaptic terminals for transforming the sequence of action potentials into multiple sequences of discrete release events, and postsynaptic components for combining such synaptic signals. The complex interaction of various cellular and molecular processes in synapses can be concisely expressed and interpreted in these two synaptic terms. Learning involves modifying the synaptic dynamics such that each axon terminal performs proper transformation function. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.