Nonlinear integration in dendrites: neurons may be smarter than we think

To run over bumpy ground, fly through branches on a windy day, or find a familiar face in a crowded room, animals do amazing feats of computation on brains made from hardware with a time scale of about 1KHz. You've probably heard that behind it all is massive parallel processing: huge numbers of neurons, each doing its little part.

But how little is one neuron's part? There are hints from cellular biophysics that single neurons can do more complex computations than they're usually given credit for. I'll give a gentle introduction to how neurons compute, explain where the bonus computing power could come from, and show how barn owls might be using extra-smart neurons to find their prey.