Sir John C. Eccles famously wrote, "I always think that inhibition is a sculpturing process. The inhibition, as it were, chisels away at the … mass of excitatory action and gives a more specific form to the neuronal performance at every stage of synaptic relay" (Eccles, 1977). The evidence listed above suggests either that Eccles attributed too much specificity to inhibition, at least with regard to its possible role in cortical sensory tuning or, more likely, that we haven't yet explored the full parameter space of sensory stimuli (e.g. timing, naturalistic stimuli) in which inhibition exerts its sculpting action. Further work will be needed to elucidate whether indeed particular types of interneurons may play a more specific role in tuning cortical responses to sensory stimuli.
