Co-dependent excitatory and inhibitory plasticity accounts for quick, stable and long-lasting memories in biological networks

The brain’s functionality is developed and maintained through synaptic plasticity. As synapses undergo plasticity, they also affect each other. The nature of such ‘co-dependency’ is difficult to disentangle experimentally, because multiple synapses must be monitored simultaneously. To help understand the experimentally observed phenomena, we introduce a framework that formalizes synaptic co-dependency between different connection types. The resulting model explains how inhibition can gate excitatory plasticity while neighboring excitatory–excitatory interactions determine the strength of long-term potentiation. Furthermore, we show how the interplay between excitatory and inhibitory synapses can account for the quick rise and long-term stability of a variety of synaptic weight profiles, such as orientation tuning and dendritic clustering of co-active synapses. In recurrent neuronal networks, co-dependent plasticity produces rich and stable motor cortex-like dynamics with high input sensitivity. Our results suggest an essential role for the neighborly synaptic interaction during learning, connecting micro-level physiology with network-wide phenomena.