Considering that the excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) and the inhibitory
postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) could summate over space and time it is not
surprise that axial dendritic voltage of tens of millivolts could be measured if there
are multiple dendritic inputs. Thus the electric intensity along the dendritic axis in
different regions of the dendritic tree could be as high as 10 V/m (if 300-400
EPSPs are temporally and spatially summated). This result is supported by the in
vivo estimate of the electric fields (E ~ 1-10 V/m) by Jaffe & Nuccitelli (1977) and
the reported data by Tuszynski et al. (1997) that quote intracellular electric
intensity values from 0.01 V/m to 10 V/m.
Electric field structure under dendritic spines
The EPSPs and IPSPs carry information from the presynaptic axonal boutons to
the dendritic spines and this information has to be decoded by the underlying
microtubules if these subneuronal structures host consciousness.
The dendritic spine consists of spine head (where the synapse is formed) and
spine stalk (a narrowing of the spine diameter raising the stalk resistance up to
800 MΩ (Miller et al., 1985). Based upon the assumption that spine head
membrane is passive, previous studies concluded that the efficacy of a synapse
onto a spine head would be less than or equal to the efficacy of an identical
synapse directly onto the 'parent' dendrite (Chang, 1952; Diamond et al., 1970;
Coss & Globus, 1978). However, for an active spine head membrane, early
steady state considerations suggested that spines might act as synaptic
amplifiers (Miller et al., 1985). This means that the ion channels located in the
spine stalk are voltage-gated and the EPSP propagation will exhibit non-linear
properties. When the voltage in the spine stalk reaches definite voltage
magnitude the channels open and amplify the synaptic input.
41
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