'Balancing' of Conductances May Explain Irregular Cortical Spiking

Five related factors are identified which enable single compartment Hodgkin-Huxley model neurons to convert random synaptic input into irregular spike trains similar to those seen in in vivo cortical recordings. We suggest that cortical neurons may operate in a narrow parameter regime where synaptic and intrinsic conductances are balanced to reflect, through spike timing, detailed correlations in the inputs. 'Please send comments to tony@salk.edu. The reference for this paper is: Technical Report no. INC-9502, February 1995, Institute for Neural Computation, UCSD, San Diego, CA 92093-0523.

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