Abstract

Neocortical neurons in vivo operate in a high-conductance state characterized by an intense intracellular fluctuating activity. Here we investigate how these conditions impact on the dendritic integration of synaptic inputs by using biophysical models of morphologically-reconstructed neocortical pyramidal neurons. We find that the combined effect of high conductance and fluctuating activity due to the synaptic background activity may set pyramidal neurons into an integrative mode which is determined by the intensity of network activity, which is fast-conducting and in which the impact of inputs is roughly location-independent.