Title: “Heterogeneity in the brain: lessons from theory and experiment.”

Abstract:
Neurons in the brain are not identical: they show a wide variety of properties. Recently, we showed that this neural diversity itself is not static: it depends on for instance input characteristics and on neuromodulatory state. How does this heterogeneity influence the dynamics and information processing of neural net-works? Is this a dial the brain can use to adapt to the requirements of different tasks? I will discuss our latest analysis of experimental data on the heterogenei-ty of cell properties and how this influences network dynamics and perfor-mance in different tasks using different types of network simulations.