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Science 17 November 1995:
Vol. 270. no. 5239, pp. 1207 - 1210
DOI: 10.1126/science.270.5239.1207
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Reports

Concerted Signaling by Retinal Ganglion Cells

Markus Meister (1),  Leon Lagnado (2),  Denis A. Baylor

To analyze the rules that govern communication between eye and brain, visual responses were recorded from an intact salamander retina. Parallel observation of many retinal ganglion cells with a microelectrode array showed that nearby neurons often fired synchronously, with spike delays of less than 10 milliseconds. The frequency of such synchronous spikes exceeded the correlation expected from a shared visual stimulus up to 20-fold. Synchronous firing persisted under a variety of visual stimuli and accounted for the majority of action potentials recorded. Analysis of receptive fields showed that concerted spikes encoded information not carried by individual cells; they may represent symbols in a multineuronal code for vision.


M. Meister, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: meister{at}biosun.harvard.edu
L. Lagnado and D. A. Baylor, Department of Neurobiology, Sherman Fairchild Science Building, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5401, USA.
(1) To whom correspondence should be addressed.
(2) Present address: Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge CB22QH, UK.


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