The selfish spike: local and global resets of dendritic excitability

Dendritic spikes are local events that occasionally propagate successfully to the soma, triggering axonal action potentials that backpropagate into the dendrites. In this issue of Neuron, Remy et al. show that single dendritic spikes in hippocampal pyramidal neurons transiently inhibit further dendritic spikes in the same branch, while backpropagating action potentials trigger a widespread reduction of dendritic excitability. Thus, dendritic spikes can cause local and global resets of dendritic spike generation, which can be exploited for computation and plasticity.