Abstract
1. The striatum is part of a multisynaptic loop involved in translating higher order cognitive activity into action. The main striatal computational unit is the medium spiny neuron, which integrates inputs arriving from widely distributed cortical neurons and provides the sole striatal output. 2. The membrane potential of medium spiny neurons' displays shifts between a very negative resting state (down state) and depolarizing plateaus (up states) which are driven by the excitatory cortical inputs. 3. Because striatal spiny neurons fire action potentials only during the up state, these plateau depolarizations are perceived as enabling events that allow information processing through cerebral cortex-basal ganglia circuits. In vivo intracellular recording techniques allow to investigate simultaneously the subthreshold behavior of the medium spiny neuron membrane potential (which is a "reading" of distributed patterns of cortical activity) and medium spiny neuron firing (which is an index of striatal output). 4. Recent studies combining intracellular recordings of striatal neurons with field potential recordings of the cerebral cortex illustrate how the analysis of the input-output transformations performed by medium spiny neurons may help to unveil some aspects of information processing in cerebral cortex-basal ganglia circuits, and to understand the origin of the clinical manifestations of Parkinson's disease and other neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders that result from alterations in dopamine-dependent information processing in the cerebral cortex-basal ganglia circuits.