Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This work addresses the connectivity of giant excitatory neurons in a part of CA1 of the hippocampus. Recordings in rat brain slices provide new evidence that these cells excite bistratified and basket inhibitory neurons, and have weak inhibitory input from basket cells, as well as other findings. This circuitry gives these cells unique potential, making the work valuable, however the strength of the evidence is currently incomplete.

eLife assessment

This useful study addresses the interesting and challenging problem of how neural networks (including possibly the brain) can optimize performance while multi-tasking. The authors address this problem by introducing an information-theoretic framework that balances the costs of control and of automaticity to achieve a desired level of overall performance. They present detailed analyses of this framework, but overall the manuscript is not easily accessible to a broad audience, and the supporting evidence is currently incomplete (but could be greatly improved with substantial revisions). They use information-theoretic terminology in non-standard ways that are not clearly explained, leading to difficulties in interpreting the framework and comparing it to other computational approaches, and the relationship between their findings and empirical data is not always clear.