What is the role of dendrites in neural computation? I read this article:
https://news.mit.edu/2019/neurons-dendrite-role-computation-0606
My question is about this: “One hypothesis is that dendritic activity will actually sharpen up for representing features of a task you taught the animals, and all the other dendritic activity, and all the other somatic activity, is going to get dampened down in the rest of the cortical cells that are not involved,” Harnett says.
How exactly are neurons that are involved in a task chosen and how exactly is it decided which neurons are then supposed to be dampened?
Probably not a question that can be easily answered, but I wanted to ask it anyway.
I think our best understanding of this (that I can think of) is Hebb's law: Neurons that fire together wire together. Basically, maybe you can think of it like a bit of information is saved in a physical space neurally. So one idea, like your grandmas face, is a combination of many of these bits being activated (This is in reference to the language of thought theory https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/). When trying to make sense of something, the more common connections will activate first and then less common ones, until an answer has been found or the task has been deemed not possible/unimportant.
As for how neurons are chosen, I would say in relation to what is already there. And dendritic connections are dampened the longer they go without linking.
To the best of my knowledge, it's still contested exactly how we encode new information. There is a lot of evidence that certain tasks can be associated to general areas of the neocortex, from neural mapping experiments.