Bifurcation analysis on the reduced dopamine neuronal model

Abstract

Bursting is a crucial form of firing in neurons, laden with substantial information. Studying it can aid in understanding the neural coding to identify human behavioral characteristics conducted by these neurons. However, the high-dimensionality of many neuron models imposes a difficult challenge in studying the generative mechanisms of bursting. On account of the high complexity and nonlinearity characteristic of these models, it becomes nearly impossible to theoretically study and analyze them. Thus, this paper proposed to address these issues by focusing on the midbrain dopamine neurons, serving as the central neuron model for the investigation of the bursting mechanisms and bifurcation behaviors exhibited by the neuron. In this study, we considered the dimensionality reduction of a high-dimensional neuronal model and analyzed the dynamical properties of the reduced system. To begin, for the original thirteen-dimensional model, using the correlation between variables, we reduced its dimensionality and obtained a simplified three-dimensional system. Then, we discussed the changing characteristics of the number of spikes within a burst by simultaneously varying two parameters. Finally, we studied the co-dimension-2 bifurcation in the reduced system and presented the bifurcation behavior near the Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation.