Stable propagation of a burst through a one-dimensional homogeneous excitatory chain model of songbird nucleus HVC

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2006 Jul;74(1 Pt 1):011918. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.74.011918. Epub 2006 Jul 26.

Abstract

We demonstrate numerically that a brief burst consisting of two to six spikes can propagate in a stable manner through a one-dimensional homogeneous feedforward chain of nonbursting neurons with excitatory synaptic connections. Our results are obtained for two kinds of neuronal models: leaky integrate-and-fire neurons and Hodgkin-Huxley neurons with five conductances. Over a range of parameters such as the maximum synaptic conductance, both kinds of chains are found to have multiple attractors of propagating bursts, with each attractor being distinguished by the number of spikes and total duration of the propagating burst. These results make plausible the hypothesis that sparse, precisely timed sequential bursts observed in projection neurons of nucleus HVC of a singing zebra finch are intrinsic and causally related.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Action Potentials / physiology*
  • Animals
  • Biological Clocks / physiology*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Excitatory Postsynaptic Potentials / physiology
  • Models, Neurological
  • Nerve Net / physiology*
  • Neurons / physiology*
  • Songbirds / physiology*
  • Synaptic Transmission / physiology*
  • Vocalization, Animal / physiology*