Chapter 7
Information Processing and
Synaptic Transmission
Vito Di Maio and Silvia Santillo
Abstract
The brain is probably the most complex machinery for information processing
we can imagine. The amount of data it manages is extremely huge. Any conscious or
unconscious event both internal and coming from the environment needs to be
perceived, elaborated, and responded with an appropriate action. Moreover, the
high-level activities of mind require the connection of logical elaboration, the relationship with past experience (memory), and the transfer of information among
different areas of the brain participating to the elaboration of the thought. Almost
all brain illnesses or even simple defaults can be related to a corruption of the basic
system which manage information in the brain. The main actors in transferring and
managing information are the synapses, and then the understanding of the brain
information processing cannot disregard the full understanding of the synaptic
functionality. In the present chapter, by using as example the most common type of
the brain synapse (the glutamatergic synapse), we will present the basic mechanism
of synaptic transmission stressing some of the most relevant mechanisms which
regulate the transfer and management of information.
Keywords: information processing, synaptic transmission, synaptic integration,
neuronal spikes, neuronal modeling, synaptic modeling
1. Introduction
The brain is probably the most complex computational machinery performing in
parallel a continuous elaboration of information coming from the environment and
from the internal of the body. Undoubtedly, independently from the level of investigation (from the molecular to the neurological and psychological level), almost all
the neurosciences deal, directly or indirectly, with the brain information processing
and/or its malfunctioning. In this chapter, we will illustrate some basic aspects of
information transfer and elaboration showing how much complex is the control of
its flow among the neurons.
Neurons share information mainly by the synaptic contacts which they use both
to transmit and to receive. The input and output contact among many neurons are
the system which operate the neural networks and the whole brain. Synapses are,
then, the key points for the information transfer among neurons, but, as we will see
in details later, they are also the primarily system of information coding and elaboration. Their activity, in fact, produces the codification of the information by a
neuron in form of spike sequences into a sequence of postsynaptic potentials (PSP)
which we can define as the first step of the postsynaptic representation of the
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Information Processing and
Synaptic Transmission
Vito Di Maio and Silvia Santillo
Abstract
The brain is probably the most complex machinery for information processing
we can imagine. The amount of data it manages is extremely huge. Any conscious or
unconscious event both internal and coming from the environment needs to be
perceived, elaborated, and responded with an appropriate action. Moreover, the
high-level activities of mind require the connection of logical elaboration, the relationship with past experience (memory), and the transfer of information among
different areas of the brain participating to the elaboration of the thought. Almost
all brain illnesses or even simple defaults can be related to a corruption of the basic
system which manage information in the brain. The main actors in transferring and
managing information are the synapses, and then the understanding of the brain
information processing cannot disregard the full understanding of the synaptic
functionality. In the present chapter, by using as example the most common type of
the brain synapse (the glutamatergic synapse), we will present the basic mechanism
of synaptic transmission stressing some of the most relevant mechanisms which
regulate the transfer and management of information.
Keywords: information processing, synaptic transmission, synaptic integration,
neuronal spikes, neuronal modeling, synaptic modeling
1. Introduction
The brain is probably the most complex computational machinery performing in
parallel a continuous elaboration of information coming from the environment and
from the internal of the body. Undoubtedly, independently from the level of investigation (from the molecular to the neurological and psychological level), almost all
the neurosciences deal, directly or indirectly, with the brain information processing
and/or its malfunctioning. In this chapter, we will illustrate some basic aspects of
information transfer and elaboration showing how much complex is the control of
its flow among the neurons.
Neurons share information mainly by the synaptic contacts which they use both
to transmit and to receive. The input and output contact among many neurons are
the system which operate the neural networks and the whole brain. Synapses are,
then, the key points for the information transfer among neurons, but, as we will see
in details later, they are also the primarily system of information coding and elaboration. Their activity, in fact, produces the codification of the information by a
neuron in form of spike sequences into a sequence of postsynaptic potentials (PSP)
which we can define as the first step of the postsynaptic representation of the
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