Lateral inhibition

In neurobiology, lateral inhibition is the capacity of an excited neuron to reduce the activity of its neighbors.

This refers to lateral inhibition between neurons that are not adjacent in a spatial sense, but in terms of modality of stimulus.

[9][10] Inhibition in single sensory neurons was discovered and investigated starting in 1949 by Haldan K. Hartline when he used algorithms to express the effect of Ganglion receptive fields.

His algorithms also help explain the experiment conducted by David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel that expressed a variation of sensory processing, including lateral inhibition, within different species.

[11] In 1956, Hartline revisited this concept of lateral inhibition in horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) eyes, during an experiment conducted with the aid of Henry G Wagner and Floyd Ratliff.

Visual lateral inhibition is the process in which photoreceptor cells aid the brain in perceiving contrast within an image.

The rods become stimulated by the energy from the light and release an excitatory neural signal to the horizontal cells.

[19] The final visual signals will be sent to the thalamus and cerebral cortex, where additional lateral inhibition occurs.

The most sensitive regions of the body have the greatest representation in any given cortical area, but they also have the smallest receptive fields.

[22] Lateral inhibition in tonotopic channels can be found in the inferior colliculus and at higher levels of auditory processing in the brain.

In embryology, the concept of lateral inhibition has been adapted to describe processes in the development of cell types.

[26] Lateral inhibition is described as a part of the Notch signaling pathway, a type of cell–cell interaction.

[28] Synthetic embryologists have also been able to replicate lateral inhibition dynamics in developing bacterial colonies,[29] creating stripes and regular structures.