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We study the effect that the heterogeneity present among the elements of an ensemble of coupled excitable neurons have on the collective response of the system to an external signal. We have considered two different interaction scenarios,…
Neurons communicate with downstream systems via sparse and incredibly brief electrical pulses, or spikes. Using these events, they control various targets such as neuromuscular units, neurosecretory systems, and other neurons in connected…
Spikes and rhythms organize control and communication in the animal world, in contrast to the bits and clocks of digital technology. As continuous-time signals that can be counted, spikes have a mixed nature. This paper reviews ongoing…
The use of spikes to carry information between brain areas implies complete or partial synchronization of the neurons involved. The degree of synchronization reached by two coupled systems and the energy cost of maintaining their…
The impact of inhibitory and excitatory synapses in delay-coupled Hodgkin--Huxley neurons that are driven by noise is studied. If both synaptic types are used for coupling, appropriately tuned delays in the inhibition feedback induce…
Deep learning has recently led to great successes in tasks such as image recognition (e.g Krizhevsky et al., 2012). However, deep networks are still outmatched by the power and versatility of the brain, perhaps in part due to the richer…
We study a system of interacting renewal processes which is a model for neuronal activity. We show that the system possesses an exponentially large number (with respect to the number of neurons in the network) of limiting configurations of…
Most neurons in the primary visual cortex initially respond vigorously when a preferred stimulus is presented, but adapt as stimulation continues. The functional consequences of adaptation are unclear. Typically a reduction of firing rate…
Thalamic relay cells fire action potentials that transmit information from retina to cortex. The amount of information that spike trains encode is usually estimated from the precision of spike timing with respect to the stimulus. Sensory…
While spike timing has been shown to carry detailed stimulus information at the sensory periphery, its possible role in network computation is less clear. Most models of computation by neural networks are based on population firing rates.…
Human cognition emerges from coordinated spiking dynamics in distributed neural circuits, where information is encoded via both firing rates and precise spike timing determined by brain rhythms. Inspired by this notion, we propose a…
Large-scale recordings of neuronal activity make it possible to gain insights into the collective activity of neural ensembles. It has been hypothesized that neural populations might be optimized to operate at a 'thermodynamic critical…
Neurons in the brain continuously process the barrage of sensory inputs they receive from the environment. A wide array of experimental work has shown that the collective activity of neural populations encodes and processes this constant…
Describing the collective activity of neural populations is a daunting task: the number of possible patterns grows exponentially with the number of cells, resulting in practically unlimited complexity. Recent empirical studies, however,…
We study the statistical physics of a surprising phenomenon arising in large networks of excitable elements in response to noise: while at low noise, solutions remain in the vicinity of the resting state and large-noise solutions show…
A fundamental problem in neuroscience is to understand how sequences of action potentials ("spikes") encode information about sensory signals and motor outputs. Although traditional theories of neural coding assume that information is…
Neuron is a noisy information processing unit and conventional view is that information in the cortex is carried on the rate of neurons spike emission. More recent studies on the activity propagation through the homogeneous network have…
Several experiments and models have highlighted the importance of neuronal heterogeneity in brain dynamics and function. However, how such a cell-to-cell diversity can affect cortical computation, synchronization, and neuronal communication…
We study the effect of intrinsic heterogeneity on the activity of a population of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. By rescaling the dynamical equation, we derive mathematical relations between multiple neuronal parameters and a fluctuating…
A common approach to interpreting spiking activity is based on identifying the firing fields---regions in physical or configuration spaces that elicit responses of neurons. Common examples include hippocampal place cells that fire at…