Heterogeneous synaptic homeostasis: A novel mechanism boosting information propagation in the cortex

Perceptual awareness of auditory stimuli decreases from wakefulness to sleep, largely due to reduced cortical responsiveness. During wakefulness, neural responses to external stimuli in most cortical areas exhibit a broader spatiotemporal propagation pattern compared to deep sleep. A potential mechanism for this phenomenon is the synaptic upscaling of cortical excitatory connections during wakefulness, as posited by the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. However, we argue that uniform synaptic upscaling alone cannot fully account for this observation. We propose a novel mechanism suggesting that the upscaling of excitatory connections between different cortical areas exceeds that within individual cortical areas during wakefulness. Our computational results demonstrate that the former promotes the transfer of neural responses and information, whereas the latter has diminishing effects. These findings highlight the necessity of heterogeneous synaptic upscaling and suggest the presence of heterogeneity in receptor expression for neuromodulators involved in synaptic modulation along the dendrite.