Collective excitability in a mesoscopic neuronal model of epileptic activity

Abstract

Aquesta és una còpia de la versió author's final draft d'un article publicat a la revista [Physical Review E]. URL d'aquest document a UPCommons E-prints:http://hdl.handle.net/2117/113120Article publicat / Published paper: Maciej J., Pons, A.J. and García-Ojalvo, J. (2018) The brain can be understood as a collection of interacting neuronal oscillators, but the extent to which its sustained activity is due to coupling among brain areas is still unclear. Here we study the joint dynamics of two cortical columns described by Jansen-Rit neural mass models, and show that coupling between the columns gives rise to stochastic initiations of sustained collective activity, which can be interpreted as epileptic events. For large enough coupling strengths, termination of these events results mainly from the emergence of synchronization between the columns, and thus is controlled by coupling instead of noise. Stochastic triggering and noise-independent durations are characteristic of excitable dynamics, and thus we interpret our results in terms of collective excitability.

The interplay between diversity and noise in an excitable cell network model

“…[22], using a simplified FitzHugh-Nagumo model of the β-cell network, Cartwright recognized the general constructive role of heterogeneity from a complex systems perspective; and, in particular, the fact that diversity can explain the emergence of synchronization in Langerhans islets, without the need to assume the presence of pacemakers, analogous to the myocardial pacemaker cells. Similar synchronization mechanisms have been shown also in other biological systems [47,48]. Later on, besides the constructive role of noise [49], also the beneficial role of diversity was recognized in the framework of more detailed models of β-cell networks [50].…”

Intensity dependence of sub-harmonics in cortical response to photic stimulation

“…A variety of mathematical models have been used to simulate and explore brain rhythms [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], of which the Jansen and Rit (J and R) is a widely used neurophysiology based neural mass model (NMM) [43,44]. It has been used to explore a variety of brain rhythms, especially the alpha [45,46]. A bifurcation analysis of this model has given valuable insights in some of the underlying non-linearities of the brainwave dynamics [47][48][49].…”