Inspired to discuss two fascinating papers from the @basu_lab_NYU and @LosonczyLab, @attila_losonczy Vincent Robert et al. 2025 science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… @asako_noguchi Asako Noguchi et al. 2026 science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… Both examine how hippocampal area CA3 flexibly processes spatial and contextual information but at different biological scales. Robert et al.: What controls the information arriving in CA3? Noguchi et al.: What does an individual CA3 neuron do with that information? Robert et al. reveal how pathway and compartment-specific excitation, feedforward inhibition, and disinhibition shape CA3 representations. Noguchi et al. show that individual dendritic branches can act as independent computational units that dynamically couple to or dissociate from the soma. Connecting these findings directly will require additional experiments, combining pathway-selective lateral entorhinal cortex manipulation with dendritic voltage imaging. Together, the papers suggest that CA3 flexibility may not be purely a network-level property. It may also emerge from computations performed within the dendrites of individual neurons. 😎