Neural adaptation
Fast and slow adaptation

There is fast adaptation and slow adaptation. Fast adaptation occurs immediately after a stimulus is presented i.e., within hundreds of milliseconds. Slow adaptive processes can take minutes, hours or even days. The two classes of neural adaptation may rely on very different physiological mechanisms. The time scale over which adaptation builds up and recovers depends on the time course of stimulation. Brief stimulation produces adaptation which occurs and recovers while more prolonged stimulation can produce slower and more lasting forms of adaptation. Also, repeated sensory stimulation appears to temporarily decrease the gain of thalamocortical synaptic transmission. Adaptation of cortical responses was stronger and recovered more slowly. Vastly different timescales of adaptation have also been shown to be implemented on the single neuron level, where they can give rise to time-scale free adaptation. At the very extreme of evolutionary timescales, neurons in different parts of retina have been found deploy differing amounts of lateral inhibition to compensate for the high dynamic range between the ground and the sky.
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