Journal Article

Emergent spike patterns in neuronal populations

Chariker, Logan, Young, Lai-Sang

2015

Overview

This numerical study documents and analyzes emergent spiking behavior in local neuronal populations. Emphasis is given to a phenomenon we call clustering , by which we refer to a tendency of random groups of neurons large and small to spontaneously coordinate their spiking activity in some fashion. Using a sparsely connected network of integrate-and-fire neurons, we demonstrate that spike clustering occurs ubiquitously in both high firing and low firing regimes. As a practical tool for quantifying such spike patterns, we propose a simple scheme with two parameters, one setting the temporal scale and the other the amount of deviation from the mean to be regarded as significant. Viewing population activity as a sequence of events , meaning relatively brief durations of elevated spiking, separated by inter-event times , we observe that background activity tends to give rise to extremely broad distributions of event sizes and inter-event times, while driving a system imposes a certain regularity on its inter-event times, producing a rhythm consistent with broad-band gamma oscillations. We note also that event sizes and inter-event times decorrelate very quickly. Dynamical analyses supported by numerical evidence are offered.

• Publisher: Springer US,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Action Potentials - physiology / Animals / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Biomedicine / Computer Simulation / Human Genetics / Humans / Models, Neurological / Neurology / Neurons - physiology / Neurosciences / Theory of Computation / Time Factors