The thalamus acts as a major gateway for sensory information from the periphery that is on its way to the cerebral cortex. Given this important role, thalamic innervation of the cortex appears to be surprisingly sparse. In a new study, Balcioglu et al. examined thalamic innervation of pyramidal neurons in cortical layer 2/3 (L2/3) and showed that this thalamic drive can generate sensory responses in a model of such neurons, despite the sparsity of the thalamic connections.