Thriving on teamwork: new research shows how brain cells filter information in groups

(Salk Institute) For decades, scientists studying the visual system thought that individual brain cells, called neurons, operate as filters. Some neurons would prefer coarse details of the visual scene and ignore fine details, while others would do the opposite. Every neuron was thought to do its own filtering. A new study led by Salk Institute researchers reveals that the same neurons that prefer coarse details could change to prefer finer details under different conditions.