ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
A synaptic organizing principle for cortical neuronal groups.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 379 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
379 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 767 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Structural characteristics of local cortical networks wired by distance dependent connectivity rules.BMC neuroscience · 2026Article
- Convergence and function of distinct corticocortical and transthalamic synapses across sensory processing hierarchies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Differentiation of cortical areas: effects of free energy minimization with broken symmetry.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Inhibitory-stabilization is sufficient for history-dependent computation in a randomly connected attractor network.Journal of computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Dynamical mechanisms for coordinating long-term working memory based on the precision of spike-timing in cortical neurons.Biological cybernetics · 2026Review
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- Developmental emergence of sparse and structured synaptic connectivity in the hippocampal CA3 memory circuit.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neurons embedded in loop-like motifs act as central hubs for brain-wide integration.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Cognitive deficits linked to intrinsic timescales and gray matter volume abnormalities in children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.Journal of neurodevelopmental disorders · 2026Article
- Functional reorganization of motor cortex connectivity during learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Deriving connectivity from spiking activity in detailed models of large-scale cortical microcircuits.iScience · 2026Article
- Editorial: The diversity of the plasticitome.Frontiers in synaptic neuroscience · 2026Article
- The volatile anesthetic isoflurane causes global suppression of neuronal activity, disrupting hub neuron function inFrontiers in systems neuroscience · 2026Article
319 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Neuronal circuitry is often considered a clean slate that can be dynamically and arbitrarily molded by experience. However, when we investigated synaptic connectivity in groups of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex, we found that both connectivity and synaptic weights were surprisingly predictable. Synaptic weights follow very closely the number of connections in a group of neurons, saturating after only 20% of possible connections are formed between neurons in a group. When we examined the network topology of connectivity between neurons, we found that the neurons cluster into small world networks that are not scale-free, with less than 2 degrees of separation. We found a simple clustering rule where connectivity is directly proportional to the number of common neighbors, which accounts for these small world networks and accurately predicts the connection probability between any two neurons. This pyramidal neuron network clusters into multiple groups of a few dozen neurons each. The neurons composing each group are surprisingly distributed, typically more than 100 μm apart, allowing for multiple groups to be interlaced in the same space. In summary, we discovered a synaptic organizing principle that groups neurons in a manner that is common across animals and hence, independent of individual experiences. We speculate that these elementary neuronal groups are prescribed Lego-like building blocks of perception and that acquired memory relies more on combining these elementary assemblies into higher-order constructs.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.