The true nature GABA effect in the developing brain has remained elusive until 2015, when the first study to directly show GABA action in live rodent brain has reported GABA to not be excitatory in its effect even though it slightly depolarised some neurons, confirming the dominance of shunting inhibition.
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If sufficient signals are received within a short period of time ( i . e . before the overall voltage decays to background ), the voltage of the segment will rise above a threshold, giving rise to a non-linear dendritic spike, which travels, effectively undiminished, all the way to the cell body, and which causes it to become partially depolarised.