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Gordon Murray Shepherd (born 1933) is a neuroscientist who carries out basic experimental and theoretical research on how neurons are organized into microcircuits to carry out the functional operations of the nervous system. He is currently professor of neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine. ==Early work== His electrophysiological studies of the olfactory bulb in 1963 produced one of the first examples of a brain microcircuit. Building on this work he collaborated with Wilfrid Rall at NIH to construct the first computational models of brain neurons. This predicted dendrodendritic interactions in the olfactory bulb, subsequently confirmed by electronmicroscopy, hypothesized to mediate lateral inhibition of the sensory input. A collaboration in 1975, using new methods of brain imaging, revealed that odors are encoded by different spatial activity patterns in the olfactory glomeruli of the olfactory bulb. This showed that the neural basis of smell in virtually all vertebrates involves odor representation by glomerular activity patterns ("odor images") which are then processed by lateral inhibition mediated by the dendrodendritic circuits. Shepherd's lab continued to use the olfactory bulb as a general model for the integrative actions of neuronal dendrites. This showed that dendrites contain multiple computational units; backpropagating action potentials in dendrites carry out specific functional operations; and dendritic spines can function as semi-independent input-output units. The lab also provided a basic circuit for olfactory cortex.〔 〕 New concepts to replace the classical "neuron doctrine" were suggested, and the term "microcircuit" for characterizing specific patterns of synaptic interactions in the nervous system. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gordon M. Shepherd」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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