ArticleNature neuroscience2016
Is cortical connectivity optimized for storing information?
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 75 papers.
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Who cites it
75 citing papers in PubMed.
- Strong and localized recurrence controls the dimensionality of neural activity across brain areas.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Enriched experience increases reciprocal synaptic connectivity and coding sparsity in higher-order cortex.Science advances · 2026Article
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- Synaptic pruning, myelination and the emergence of psychiatric disorders in late adolescence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Illuminating the black box of reservoir computing.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Balancing Stability and Flow in Hippocampal Networks via Inductive Bias and Learned Symmetry Breaking.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Developmental emergence of sparse and structured synaptic connectivity in the hippocampal CA3 memory circuit.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Task success in trained spiking neural network models coincides with emergence of cross-stimulus-modulated inhibition.Biological cybernetics · 2026Article
- Structural and dynamical strategies to prevent runaway excitation in reservoir computing.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Review
- Two-factor synaptic consolidation reconciles robustness with pruning and homeostatic scaling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Learning neural dynamics through instructive signals.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Enriched experience increases reciprocal synaptic connectivity and coding sparsity in higher-order cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Sparse Learning Enabled by Constraints on Connectivity and Function.Physical review letters · 2025Article
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- Inferring neural population codes forProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Parallel synapses with transmission nonlinearities enhance neuronal classification capacity.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
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- A non-Hebbian code for episodic memory.Science advances · 2025Article
- Heterogeneous and higher-order cortical connectivity undergirds efficient, robust, and reliable neural codes.iScience · 2025Article
- Principles of visual cortex excitatory microcircuit organization.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2025Article
15 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cortical networks are thought to be shaped by experience-dependent synaptic plasticity. Theoretical studies have shown that synaptic plasticity allows a network to store a memory of patterns of activity such that they become attractors of the dynamics of the network. Here we study the properties of the excitatory synaptic connectivity in a network that maximizes the number of stored patterns of activity in a robust fashion. We show that the resulting synaptic connectivity matrix has the following properties: it is sparse, with a large fraction of zero synaptic weights ('potential' synapses); bidirectionally coupled pairs of neurons are over-represented in comparison to a random network; and bidirectionally connected pairs have stronger synapses on average than unidirectionally connected pairs. All these features reproduce quantitatively available data on connectivity in cortex. This suggests synaptic connectivity in cortex is optimized to store a large number of attractor states in a robust fashion.
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Registered trials
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