Neural and axonal heterogeneity improves information transmission

Abstract

The complexity of the brain lies in an intricate, not homogeneous structure; however, it is not clear how important is the heterogeneity at neural and structural levels and how it may play an important constituent in the brain’s functionality. Here we show the role of cellular and axonal delay heterogeneity in the brain’s performance. We simulated, at different scales, the spiking activity on a toroidal network realized in multiple dimensions with varying degrees of heterogeneity on a network of Izhikevich neuron models. We found that increasing the heterogeneity and network dimension improved the robustness and propagation speed of the spiking activity. Our results demonstrate that the behavior of the spiking activity depends on both the cellular neural and axonal delay heterogeneity. We developed a simple theoretical framework compatible with the results of the simulations, putting forward a novel method to strategically analyze any similar networks.