I'm looking for examples in the history of neuroscience where no one thought to measure something until a theory posited that it should exist (i.e., empirical phenomena that were effectively invisible in the absence of theory).
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I think it's safe to say the push to check whether EI balance dynamically emerges in different circumstances was theory-driven.
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Also: Rail's computational models of dendritic effects on firing came before people looked for that afaik. Obviously reward prediction errors are a big one (tho more of a retroactive interpretation of data). The hunt for how priors are stored in the brain could also be considered
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Interestingly, the notion of EI balance came first from psychology. Hans Eysenck (1955) suggested an excitation-inhibition balance responsible for extroversion-introversion personality traits. Extroverts being fast exc and slow inh, and introverts slow exc and fast inh. (1/2)
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Next it appeared in a theory paper Gerstain and Mandelbrot (of Mandelbrot sets) (1964). They suggested that it could explain the irregular (Poisson-like) cortical firing. The first observation came much later (Wehr and Zador, 2003?). So I'd say EI balance + neural coding. (2/2)
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