Talk:Intrinsic plasticity

Reviewer Comments:

Overall the article is comprehensive and well written. A few suggestions to improve the encyclopedic quality of the article is to explain some of the technical terms used within the article which might not be known to the general reader. Also, there needs to be better transitions from section to section, many of the section heading make no sense. As far as content, it would be good to talk about the possible maladaptive role of intrinsic plasticity in the generation of epilepsy. Finally, there is a lot of work from visual cortex describing how simple changes in spike threshold may alter response selectivity of V1 neurons (eg. see work by Ferster or Carandini). Not many people have reviewed these papers within the context of intrinsic plasticity, it might fit nicely in the functional section.

Authors Response:

We have updated the article to take into account the comments of the reviewers. We believe these changes improves the content, readability, and encyclopedic quality of the article.

In particular we have:

-Remade Fig 1 and rewritten the caption.

-We have made changes to the wording used for subject headings.

-We have added a section which speculates on the role of pathologies of intrinsic excitability in disease (Disruption of intrinsic plasticity).

-We chose to not include a discussion of the work of Ferster and Carandini which describes how spike threshold can mediate differential responses of area V1 neurons to visual stimulation. While this work is interesting, they do not speak of intrinsic plasticity per se but only of the fact that different neurons have different spike thresholds. It would be interesting to determine the reason for the observed differences in spike threshold, identifying the channels responsible.