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Emergent spike patterns in neuronal populations

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1 If the refractory period is absent or too short, g E may increase with each population spike. Our 4ms refractory period was chosen to quench this build-up in conductance and subsequent runaway spiking. It has virtually no effect on regimes other than those with very small α.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Logan Chariker & Lai-Sang Young

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  1. Logan Chariker
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  2. Lai-Sang Young
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Action Editor: David Terman

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest

This research is supported in part by NSF Grant DMS-1101594.

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Chariker, L., Young, LS. Emergent spike patterns in neuronal populations. J Comput Neurosci 38, 203–220 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10827-014-0534-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10827-014-0534-4

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