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Regarding your question about losing synapses; yes, synapses are regularly lost in a process called Synaptic Pruning. From the Wikipedia article: A decrease in synapses is seen after adolescence reflecting synaptic pruning, and approximately 50% of neurons during development do not survive until adulthood. Pruning is influenced by environmental factors ...

Spine formation (spinogenesis) is almost certainly due to chemical, rather than electrical, signalling between neurons. Although there are exceptions (gap junctions, for one), most forms of inter-cellular communication are mediated by chemicals released by one cell and detected by another. You are right that the cues for synaptogenesis are probably localized ...

Dendritic spines are thought to grow and recede under LTP and LTD, respectively. See (Bosch and Hayoshi 2011) for a review. From there, much of the synaptogenesis occurs due to surface molecules present both on the dendrite and the presynaptic axon in the growth cone. Localization and guidance are achieved through gradients of growth factors in the ...

An inhibitory synapse works just like a stimulatory one! When a presynaptic neuron fires it will release a neurotransmitter at its terminal(s). This neurotransmitter can be excitatory or inhibitory, the main excitatory one being glutamate and the main inhibitory one GABA.* GABA and Glu are far from being the only neurotransmitters in the brain, they're ...

You are looking for a review on vesicle cargoing along the cytoskeleton. This open access article is the most recent I found on the subject. From the abstract: How synaptic cargos achieve specificity, directionality and timing of transport is a developing area of investigation. Recent studies demonstrate that the docking of motors to their cargos is a ...

From your comment to nico's good answer, it seems that your question is really about how synaptic potentials propagate through dendrites. Canonically, synaptic potentials travel passively along membranes and is described by cable theory. The cable equation describes how the voltage will change over time and space along a cable. The theory was originally ...