The most basic functional role commonly ascribed to synchrony in the brain is that of amplifying excitatory neuronal signals. The reasoning is straightforward: When positive charge is injected into a leaky target neuron over a time window of positive duration, some of it will have time to leak back out before an action potential is triggered in the target, and it will in that sense be wasted. If the goal is to elicit a firing response in the target using as little charge as possible, it seems best to deliver the charge all at once, i.e., in perfect synchrony. In this article, we show that this reasoning is correct only if one assumes that the input ceases when the target crosses the firing threshold, but before it actually fires. If the input ceases later-for instance, in response to a feedback signal triggered by the firing of the target-the "most economical" way of delivering input (the way that requires the least total amount of input) is no longer precisely synchronous, but merely approximately so. If the target is a heterogeneous network, as it always is in the brain, then ceasing the input "when the target crosses the firing threshold" is not an option, because there is no single moment when the firing threshold is crossed. In this sense, precise synchrony is never optimal in the brain.

中文翻译：

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近似而非完美的同步最大化了兴奋性神经元集成的下游效果。

通常归因于大脑同步的最基本的功能性作用是放大兴奋性神经元信号。道理很简单：当在正向持续时间的时间窗内将正电荷注入泄漏的目标神经元时，在目标中触发动作电位之前，其中一些将有时间泄漏回去，从某种意义上讲，它将是浪费了。如果目标是使用尽可能少的电荷在目标中引发射击反应，则最好一次全部地（即完全同步）传递电荷。在本文中，我们证明只有当假定目标越过触发阈值但在实际触发之前输入就停止输入时，这种推理才是正确的。如果输入稍后停止，例如，响应于由目标的发射触发的反馈信号，“最经济”的输入传递方式（要求输入总量最少的方式）不再精确同步，而仅仅是近似同步。如果目标是异类网络（就像它始终在大脑中一样），那么“当目标超过发射阈值时”停止输入是不可行的，因为没有任何时刻会超过发射阈值。从这个意义上说，精确的同步永远不会在大脑中达到最佳。