Slide 4

Figure 4. Neuronal activity can be viewed as traffic between buildings and the roads are the axons. Pictured is a nighttime scene on Yale campus. Photo by Andrea Hasenstaub.

We have developed a slice preparation that exhibits a pattern of spontaneous activity known as Up and Down states (Sanchez-Vives and McCormick, 2000; Shu et al., 2003); To examine the mechanisms of information transfer in the cortex, we examined the communication of these Up and Down states down cortical axons. In the next slide we show the characteristics of spontaneous Up and Down states and other forms of synaptic activity in vivo.