Strength through Diversity

The remarkable versatility of the mammalian brain is made possible by a huge diversity of cellular plasticity mechanisms. These include long-term potentiation and depression at both excitatory and inhibitory synapses, as well as a variety of intrinsic and homeostatic plasticity mechanisms. A fundamental challenge for the field is to assemble our detailed knowledge of these specific mechanisms into a coherent picture of how plasticity within cortical circuits works to tune network properties.