Of mice and men

A lot of people spend a lot of time modelling the behaviour of neurons, often using a model which is founded on the idea that the weighted sum of the inputs from the synapses determines the output up the axon.

However, some other people at Boston University (MA) have produced the striking picture reproduced left of a small bit of the brain of a mouse, a bit of the brain which looks after one of the whiskers. Two chunks from two neurons, one blue and one green, The numbered yellow blobs are the synapses. White bar a micron, a thousandth of a millimetre?

But can we really expect to model the behaviour of something as complicated as this picture with a weighted average? Would we get the same sort of picture if we tried this on a human?