Category Archives: Astrocytes

Astrocytes are brain cells that are often completely overlooked and dismissed or, in the opposite extreme, presented as mysterious devices that somehow solve all problems of computational neuroscience. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but it is not clear yet where exactly. First of all, we still do not understand even the basic mechanistic rules by which individual astrocytes operate. For neurons, we have precise, often even mathematical ideas how they receive input via synapses, how they depolarize, and how depolarizations propagate to the soma and elicit action potentials. For astrocytes, this mechanistic book of rules is still missing – and this gap limits our ability to interpret experiments or build coherent theories. Continue reading →