There is one more type of neuron nearby, a type of neuron that sits in the very first bit of visual cortex but does not particularly care for the view. Everything we’ve landed on so far is an excitatory neuron, a stellate cell with its starburst tree or a pyramidal cell with its above-and-below tree. But as clones of our spike travel along some branches of the axon, they leap gaps onto rare GABA-toting neurons, neurons that get nothing from the retina, and only branch their axons inside the region of cortex their bodies sit in. Hence we call them interneurons. They are the wellsprings of the
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