The brain has a never-ending internal activity, whose spatiotemporal evolution impacts how we perceive external inputs and generate illusions. The spatiotemporal evolution depends on the neuronal network structure, which forms such a rich dynamic system that the internal interaction with external inputs has remained poorly understood. We used reproducible touch-related spatiotemporal inputs and recorded intracellularly from rat neocortical neurons to characterize this interaction at the

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... y level. Although repeated presentations of the same input generated variable responses, they tended to sort into a set of preferred response states, unique for each neuron. This suggests that sensory inputs combine with internal brain network dynamics to cause it to fall into one out of many possible local minima solutions with disparate instantiations in the subnetworks connected to each neuron.