NOISY SYNAPSES AND INFORMATION STORAGE D.B.Chklovskii1*; L.R.Varshney1,2 1. Theoretical Neurobiology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA 2. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA Given that synapses play a crucial role in communication between neurons, the noisy nature of central synapses is rather surprising. Here we examine the dual role of synapses, in information storage by means of their weights. In this context, synapse noisiness arises naturally as a biophysical consequence of their small size if volume represents a scarce resource. Since weaker synapses are smaller than stronger ones, splitting one strong synapse into several weak (and hence noisy) ones maximizes information storage capacity in a given volume. Although information storage capacity is maximized with small, noisy synapses, speed of memory retrieval suffers. The competing desiderata for information storage (capacity) and information retrieval (speed) cast the neural information storage problem into a classical capacity-speed under cost constraints tradeoff as is encountered in electronic and magnetic memory systems. We posit that the wide distribution of synaptic strengths that is observed in the brain suggests that some portions of the brain are fast, robust, but less capacious, and may serve as infrastructural elements, whereas other portions of the brain are slow but more capacious, serving as depositories of information. Support Contributed By: NIH Citation:D.B. Chklovskii, L.R. Varshney. NOISY SYNAPSES AND INFORMATION STORAGE Program No. 965.17. 2005 Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner. Washington, DC: Society for Neuroscience, 2005. Online. 2005 Copyright by the Society for Neuroscience all rights reserved. Permission to republish any abstract or part of any abstract in any form must be obtained in writing from the SfN office prior to publication