Control strategies of 3-cell Central Pattern Generator via global stimuli

Abstract

The study of the synchronization patterns of small neuron networks that control several biological processes has become an interesting growing discipline. Some of these synchronization patterns of individual neurons are related to some undesirable neurological diseases, and they are believed to play a crucial role in the emergence of pathological rhythmic brain activity in different diseases, like Parkinson’s disease. We show how, with a suitable combination of short and weak global inhibitory and excitatory stimuli over the whole network, we can switch between different stable bursting patterns in small neuron networks (in our case a 3-neuron network). We develop a systematic study showing and explaining the effects of applying the pulses at different moments. Moreover, we compare the technique on a completely symmetric network and on a slightly perturbed one (a much more realistic situation). The present approach of using global stimuli may allow to avoid undesirable synchronization patterns with nonaggressive stimuli.

Gait Transitions in a Phase Oscillator Model of an Insect Central Pattern Generator

“…Recent studies of different 3-cell ion-channel bursting CPG networks [25,26,27] share some common features with the current paper. Without explicitly addressing insect locomotion, or using phase reduction theory, the authors numerically extract Poincaré maps defined on 2-dimensional tori which have multiple stable fixed points corresponding to orbits with specific phase differences.…”

“…is the characteristic polynomial of J 1 (Equation (29)) and Tr and Det are defined in Equations (27).…”

“Brainland” vs. “flatland”: How many dimensions do we need in brain dynamics?

“…In fact, the use of small neuronal ensembles is basic in several areas of Neuroscience, as not all the neuronal processes are generated in the brain. A lot of physiological phenomena are controlled by small groups of neurons, the Central Pattern Generators (CPG) that produce rhythmic outputs in the absence of input [6,7], like in walking, breathing, flying, and swimming movements.…”

A simple multiobjective evolutionary algorithm for design of digital maps

“…The Dmap is defined on a set of points and can generate various periodic spike-trains (PSTs). The PSTs are applicable to various systems including modeling of spiking neurons [11], spike-based communications [12,13], central pattern generators [14], and time-series approximation [8]. The Dmap is suitable in FPGA-based hardware implementations and several circuit designs can be found in [15,16].…”