Disconnected Synapses was recorded at Palais Gaumont, Paris December 15, 1970.
Katz won the Nobel for his discovery with Paul Fatt that neurotransmitter release at synapses is "quantal"—that is, that at any particular synapse the amount of neurotransmitter released is never less than a certain amount, and if more is always an integral number times this amount.
At gap junctions, cells approach within about 3.5 nm of each other, rather than the 20 to 40 nm distance that separates cells at chemical synapses.
Signals pass across the synapses from one nerve cell to the next as discrete (digital) packets of chemicals, which are then summed within the nerve cell in an analog fashion by building an electro-chemical potential until its threshold is reached, whereupon it discharges and sends out a series of digital packets to the next nerve cell.
In 1994, Hava Siegelmann proved that her new (1991) computational model, the Artificial Recurrent Neural Network (ARNN), could perform hypercomputation (using infinite precision real weights for the synapses).
A similar protein in mice is found in synapses and focal adhesion plaques, and binds the FERM domain of talin through its C-terminus.
A long-term, concurrent confocal microscopy and electrophysiology investigation conducted on cortical rat in-vitro neural networks (age > 3 weeks in-vitro) growing on Multi Electrode Arrays examined the correlation between network activity levels and changes in the sizes of individual synapses.