Summary

Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications

2013

Session Number:C1L-B

Session:

Number:349

Optimal spike-based communication with internal fluctuation in cortical networks

Jun-nosuke Teramae,  Tomoki Fukai,  

pp.349-349

Publication Date:

Online ISSN:2188-5079

DOI:10.15248/proc.2.349

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Cortical network retains irregular, asynchronous firings spontaneously at low firing rate even without sensory stimulus, which often referred as the internal noise in the brain. Reverberating synaptic activation in recurrent network is considered to generate the internal noise. However, underlying mechanism by which the cortical circuit maintains the low-rate irregular state remains elusive. Moreover, computational functional of the internal noise is also unclear. In the study, considering recently reported highly heterogeneous weight distribution, typically the lognormal distribution, among excitatory neurons [1][2], we show that a network of cortical neurons can robustly sustain the irregular spontaneous firing. The generated state well agrees with various reported biological characteristics of cortical spontaneous activity including conductance measurements of neurons [3][4]. To our surprise, the generated internal noise optimally enhances the response of individual neurons to spike input and optimizes spike transmission fidelity between neurons [5]. Strong-sparse and weak-dense synaptic weights play different roles for the precise spike information transmission. Thus, our results identify simple network mechanism for internal noise for both stability and optimal spike-based communication.

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