This supralinear sum is a sudden jump of voltage in the branch where the inputs land. Enough inputs arriving together opens up new holes in the neuron’s skin, allowing extra ions to flow into the neuron, driving up the voltage in that bit of branch. And if you’re thinking that sounds like a spike, you’d not be far off. While not a pretty, peaky thing, this sudden jump in voltage in the tree has the same job: get information from the far reaches of the tree down to the neuron’s body intact. So if a bunch of inputs turn up at same time, they evoke this superblip that rushes down the tree and
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