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How the Brain Balances Excitation and Inhibition


A healthy brain maintains a harmony of neurons that excite or inhibit other neurons, but the lines between different types of cells are blurrier than researchers once thought.

Now-famous drawings by the neuroanatomist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed, for the first time, the distinctiveness and diversity of the fundamental building blocks of the mammalian brain that we call neurons. Inhibitory neurons have “often been ascribed support roles,” said Annabelle Singer, a neuroscientist and neuroengineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. But da Costa and his team, as part of the Microns project, a large-scale effort to fully map out a 1-cubic-millimeter portion of a mouse’s visual cortex, discovered that inhibitory neurons are very specific in choosing what cells to inhibit.

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