Filtering by the cell != filtering by the network

Back in 2014 I read this paper, from Judith Hirsch’s lab. To my simple mind, it was a pretty complex model, but it had a cute little video of the thalamus reducing position noise from the retina. I’m not going to lie, I still don’t fully understand the original paper, but probably due to an urge to avoid doing experiments, I felt drawn to make simple integrate and fire model of the retina -> thalamus circuit to see if it filtered noise. The result were somewhat predictable, and I tucked them away. But then an opportunity came to fish them out of the proverbial desk draw, and then I noted something quite interesting: The way the individual cells filtered their input was the opposite of how the network filtered its input. It led me to publish this article. Below you can play with some of the simulations I used to produce the paper*.

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