In this paper we discuss continuum models of phase separation in polymer solutions, with emphasis on the thermodynamic foundation of these models. We demand that these models obey a free energy dissipation relation, which in the present context plays the role of the second law of thermodynamics, since the system is isothermal. First, we derive a modified two-fluid model for viscoelastic phase separation from nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Then we study the special case when only diffusion is present, and hydrodynamic effects are neglected. Numerical results demonstrate that our models show better stability properties and at the same time reproduce the expected physical phenomena such as volume shrinking and phase inversion. Our findings suggest that these important phenomena are caused by a diffusional asymmetry of the constituent molecules.

Granger causality (GC) is a powerful method for causal inference for time series. In general, the GC value is computed using discrete time series sampled from continuous-time processes with a certain sampling interval length τ, i.e., the GC value is a function of τ. Using the GC analysis for the topology extraction of the simplest integrate-and-fire neuronal network of two neurons, we discuss behaviors of the GC value as a function of τ, which exhibits (i) oscillations, often vanishing at certain finite sampling interval lengths, (ii) the GC vanishes linearly as one uses finer and finer sampling. We show that these sampling effects can occur in both linear and non-linear dynamics: the GC value may vanish in the presence of true causal influence or become non-zero in the absence of causal influence. Without properly taking this issue into account, GC analysis may produce unreliable conclusions about causal influence when applied to empirical data. These sampling artifacts on the GC value greatly complicate the reliability of causal inference using the GC analysis, in general, and the validity of topology reconstruction for networks, in particular. We use idealized linear models to illustrate possible mechanisms underlying these phenomena and to gain insight into the general spectral structures that give rise to these sampling effects. Finally, we present an approach to circumvent these sampling artifacts to obtain reliable GC values.

Complex dendrites in general present formidable challenges to understanding neuronal information processing. To circumvent the difficulty, a prevalent viewpoint simplifies the neuronal morphology as a point representing the soma, and the excitatory and inhibitory synaptic currents originated from the dendrites are treated as linearly summed at the soma. Despite its extensive applications, the validity of the synaptic current description remains unclear, and the existing point neuron framework fails to characterize the spatiotemporal aspects of dendritic integration supporting specific computations. Using electrophysiological experiments, realistic neuronal simulations, and theoretical analyses, we demonstrate that the traditional assumption of linear summation of synaptic currents is oversimplified and underestimates the inhibition effect. We then derive a form of synaptic integration current within the point neuron framework to capture dendritic effects. In the derived form, the interaction between each pair of synaptic inputs on the dendrites can be reliably parameterized by a single coefficient, suggesting the inherent low-dimensional structure of dendritic integration. We further generalize the form of synaptic integration current to capture the spatiotemporal interactions among multiple synaptic inputs and show that a point neuron model with the synaptic integration current incorporated possesses the computational ability of a spatial neuron with dendrites, including direction selectivity, coincidence detection, logical operation, and a bilinear dendritic integration rule discovered in experiment. Our work amends the modeling of synaptic inputs and improves the computational power of a modeling neuron within the point neuron framework.

We study the reconstruction of structural connectivity for a general class of pulse-coupled nonlinear networks and show that the reconstruction can be successfully achieved through linear Granger causality (GC) analysis. Using spike-triggered correlation of whitened signals, we obtain a quadratic relationship between GC and the network couplings, thus establishing a direct link between the causal connectivity and the structural connectivity within these networks. Our work may provide insight into the applicability of GC in the study of the function of general nonlinear networks.

Neurons process information via integration of synaptic inputs from dendrites. Many experimental results demonstrate dendritic integration could be highly nonlinear, yet few theoretical analyses have been performed to obtain a precise quantitative characterization analytically. Based on asymptotic analysis of a two-compartment passive cable model, given a pair of time-dependent synaptic conductance inputs, we derive a bilinear spatiotemporal dendritic integration rule. The summed somatic potential can be well approximated by the linear summation of the two postsynaptic potentials elicited separately, plus a third additional bilinear term proportional to their product with a proportionality coefficient . The rule is valid for a pair of synaptic inputs of all types, including excitation-inhibition, excitation-excitation, and inhibition-inhibition. In addition, the rule is valid during the whole dendritic integration process for a pair of synaptic inputs with arbitrary input time differences and input locations. The coefficient is demonstrated to be nearly independent of the input strengths but is dependent on input times and input locations. This rule is then verified through simulation of a realistic pyramidal neuron model and in electrophysiological experiments of rat hippocampal CA1 neurons. The rule is further generalized to describe the spatiotemporal dendritic integration of multiple excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs. The integration of multiple inputs can be decomposed into the sum of all possible pairwise integration, where each paired integration obeys the bilinear rule. This decomposition leads to a graph representation of dendritic integration, which can be viewed as functionally sparse.