To explore these jungles, neuroscientists have

traditionally relied on electrodes that sample brain activity only very sparsely—from one to a few neurons within a given region. However, neural circuits can involve millions of neurons, so it is probable that neuronal ensembles operate at a multineuronal level of organization, one that will be invisible from single neuron recordings, just as it would be pointless to view an HDTV program by looking just at one or a few pixels on a screen. Neural circuit function is therefore likely to be emergent—that is, it could arise from complex interactions among constituents. This hypothesis is supported by the well-documented recurrent and distributed http://www.selleckchem.com/products/CP-690550.html architecture of connections in the CNS. Indeed, individual neurons generally form synaptic contacts with thousands of other neurons. In distributed circuits, the larger the connectivity matrix, the greater the redundancy within the network and the less important each neuron is. Despite these anatomical facts, neurophysiological studies have gravitated toward detailed descriptions of the stable feature

selectivity of individual neurons, a natural consequence of single-electrode recordings. However, given their distributed connections and their plasticity, neurons are likely to be subject to continuous, dynamic rearrangements, participating at different times in different active

ensembles. Because of this, measuring selleck inhibitor emergent functional states, such as dynamical attractors, could be more useful for characterizing the functional properties of a circuit than recording receptive field responses from individual cells. Indeed, in some instances where large-scale population monitoring of neuronal ensembles has been possible, emergent circuit states have Procainamide not been predictable from responses from individual cells. Emergent-level problems are not unique to neuroscience. Breakthroughs in understanding complex systems in other fields have come from shifting the focus to the emergent level. Examples include statistical mechanics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and many-body and quantum physics. Emergent-level analysis has led to rich branches of science describing novel states of matter involving correlated particles, such as magnetism, superconductivity, superfluidity, quantum Hall effects, and macroscopic quantum coherence. In biological sciences, the sequencing of genomes and the ability to simultaneously measure genome-wide expression patterns have enabled emergent models of gene regulation, developmental control, and disease states with enhanced predictive accuracy. We believe similar emergent-level richness is in store for circuit neuroscience. An emergent level of analysis appears to us crucial for understanding brain circuits.