Co-emergence of multi-scale cortical activities of irregular firing, oscillations and avalanches achieves cost-efficient information capacity.

Dong-Ping Yang,Hai-Jun Zhou,Changsong Zhou,Claus C Hilgetag

doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005384

Abstract

The brain is highly energy consuming, therefore is under strong selective pressure to achieve cost-efficiency in both cortical connectivities and activities. However, cost-efficiency as a design principle for cortical activities has been rarely studied. Especially it is not clear how cost-efficiency is related to ubiquitously observed multi-scale properties: irregular firing, oscillations and neuronal avalanches. Here we demonstrate that these prominent properties can be simultaneously observed in a generic, biologically plausible neural circuit model that captures excitation-inhibition balance and realistic dynamics of synaptic conductance. Their co-emergence achieves minimal energy cost as well as maximal energy efficiency on information capacity, when neuronal firing are coordinated and shaped by moderate synchrony to reduce otherwise redundant spikes, and the dynamical clusterings are maintained in the form of neuronal avalanches. Such cost-efficient neural dynamics can be employed as a foundation for further efficient information processing under energy constraint.

Highlights

Complex spatiotemporal patterns are ubiquitously observed in spontaneous cortical activities in vitro and in vivo, with prominent features at multiple scales: irregular individual firing [1,2,3], synchronized oscillations [4,5,6] and neuronal avalanches [7,8,9,10]
The cortex is likely to be under considerable selective pressure to reduce spike rates but to maintain efficient information processing
Cortical activities are ubiquitously observed at multiple scales with prominent features: irregular individual firing, synchronized oscillations and neuronal avalanches

Summary

Introduction

Complex spatiotemporal patterns are ubiquitously observed in spontaneous cortical activities in vitro and in vivo, with prominent features at multiple scales: irregular individual firing [1,2,3], synchronized oscillations [4,5,6] and neuronal avalanches [7,8,9,10]. The sizes of spiking clusters in neuronal avalanches follow a power-law distribution, suggesting that such activities are generated by a scale-invariant dynamics, as the system poised at a critical state [11, 12]. Self-organized criticality has been considered as an overriding organizing mechanism for the cortical activities at different scales [13,14,15]. Complex spatiotemporal patterns are significant on numerous aspects of neural information processing

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion