  The brain is a highly efficient system evolved to achieve high performance
with limited resources. We propose that dendrites make information processing
and storage in the brain more efficient through the segregation of inputs and
their conditional integration via nonlinear events, the compartmentalization of
activity and plasticity and the binding of information through synapse
clustering. In real-world scenarios with limited energy and space, dendrites
help biological networks process natural stimuli on behavioral timescales,
perform the inference process on those stimuli in a context-specific manner,
and store the information in overlapping populations of neurons. A global
picture starts to emerge, in which dendrites help the brain achieve efficiency
through a combination of optimization strategies balancing the tradeoff between
performance and resource utilization.
