Mostly Biomathematics Lunchtime Seminar
Mechanisms of emergence and maintenance of rhythmic and non-rhythmic fluctuations in spiking neuronal networks
Speaker: Rodrigo FO Pena, Federated Department of Biological Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University
Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1314
Date: Tuesday, September 3, 2019, 12:30 p.m.
Synopsis:
In cortical network models with spiking neurons, the mechanisms responsible for the emergence and impact of neuronal activity fluctuations are not yet completely understood. In this work, computational models of cortical networks were used to investigate how rhythmic and non-rhythmic fluctuations arise. Simplified spiking neurons and networks with two types of topology were studied: random and hierarchical modular, this latter inspired on experimental evidence about cortical architecture. In this talk, I will discuss how rhythmic self-sustained activity patterns emerge in hierarchical modular networks. I will show how the lifetime of these activity patterns depend on the hierarchical level of the network and its neuronal composition. Next, I will discuss the effect of the introduction of synaptic noise which creates intermittent alternations between rhythmic and non-rhythmic activity patterns with characteristics similar to synchronous and asynchronous cortical states. Finally, I will show a reductionist approach for homogeneous neuronal networks, in which an iterative self-consistent scheme is used so that a single neuron spike train generates second-order statistical properties similar to the ones of a network. We extended this scheme to heterogeneous networks and used it to capture situations in which slow activity fluctuations emerge.