[bl]

If you are interested in making a very stretched analogy, demonstrating dendritic information processing is like realizing that a CPU's transistor is actually itself a little CPU that is itself capable of quite sophisticated computation. In fact, most of a neuron's computation my be carried out by the dendrites. Don't get tied up in the over-simplified model of dendrite=antenna, soma=computer, axon=wires.

Active dendritic information processing has, for several decades, been theorized and modeled. The combination of two-photon microscopy and more "classical" electrophysiology techniques (like patch clamping used in this article) is finally opening the theories to experimentation.

[Not to be too critical, but this paper is far from the first to experimentally investigate dendritic information processing. I, personally, am glad some segment of HN is interested in neural computation.]