different areas of interneuron connection.

The spiking pattern is important and critical with regards to how information is stored and how information in different regions is interconnected. Spiking pattern is currently a research area and cluttered by many different hypotheses. Until better instruments and techniques are available to better prove these hypotheses, how spike patterns influence information storage will remain unknown. It is known that the number of spikes is fewer and with slower spike rates for weak stimuli than strong stimuli, i.e. a response to strong stimulus produce a higher spike rate and a greater number of spikes. Hence, there is a need for the balance of spike responses with respect to the stimulus intensity, i.e. some kind of normalization is needed. However, it is not exactly clear how the normalization takes place in the cortex. It is certain that normalization happens at a much slower time scale than spiking, i.e. in seconds rather than milliseconds. One of the leading mechanisms for normalization is said to be the shunting inhibition in the cortex. Research work supporting shunting inhibition that led to normalization in the cortex includes (Albrecht and Geisler, 1991; Heeger, 1992; Borg-Graham et al., 1998) and (Hirsch et al., 1998). Shunting inhibition includes synaptic depression at active synapses and intrinsic modulation (normalization) of synaptic currents. (Carandini and Heeger, 1994) proposed that the normalization signal would take the form of a shunting inhibition driven by the pooled responses of surrounding neurons of many different preferred orientations and spatial frequencies. And this shunting inhibition, which would thus be orientation independent but increases with stimulus contrast, would increase the conductance of a cell. The conductance has a normalizing effect on the excitatory current of the cell. However, one cannot dispute that something other than shunting may take place that somehow balances hyperpolarizing (nonshunting) inhibition with the excitatory current of the cell. How is model normalization achieved in the cortex? One of the approaches is to use the shunting network model. This shunting network model is proposed by Professor Stephen Grossberg from