Dragon-king-like extreme events in coupled bursting neurons.

Abstract

We present evidence of extreme events in two Hindmarsh-Rose (HR) bursting neurons mutually interacting via two different coupling configurations: chemical synaptic- and gap junctional-type diffusive coupling. A dragon-king-like probability distribution of the extreme events is seen for combinations of synaptic coupling where small- to medium-size events obey a power law and the larger events that cross an extreme limit are outliers. The extreme events originate due to instability in antiphase synchronization of the coupled systems via two different routes, intermittency and quasiperiodicity routes to complex dynamics for purely excitatory and inhibitory chemical synaptic coupling, respectively. For a mixed type of inhibitory and excitatory chemical synaptic interactions, the intermittency route to extreme events is only seen. Extreme events with our suggested distribution is also seen for gap junctional-type diffusive, but repulsive, coupling where the intermittency route to complexity is found. A simple electronic experiment using two diffusively coupled analog circuits of the HR neuron model, but interacting in a repulsive way, confirms occurrence of the dragon-king-like extreme events.