Our brains can distinguish highly similar patterns, thanks to a process called pattern separation. How our brains separate patterns is, however, not yet fully understood. Using a full-scale computer model of the dentate gyrus, a brain region involved in pattern separation, Peter Jonas, professor at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria, found that inhibitory neurons activated by one pattern suppress all their neighboring neurons, thereby switching off “competing” similar patterns. This is the result of a study published in Nature Computational Science.