Spatiotemporal activities of neural network exposed to external electric fields

Abstract

Neural electrical activities are due to the movement of ions in/out of the neuron and can be modulated by an external electric field. Moreover, clinical evidences reveal that the modulated activities of brain tissue by an external electric field are associated with normal or pathological brain functions. In this paper, we investigated the spatiotemporal activities of a network of neurons considering an AC electric field. It is shown that the external electric field has a significant impact on the activities of the neural network. The strong external electric field facilitates the neuron firing action potentials and enhances the mean firing rate of the network, but disrupts the synchronicity of the activities of the neural network. The information entropy revealed that the external field is capable of changing the amount of information in the neural network and the interspike internals distribution can also be changed by the external field regardless the network parameters. It is observed a v-shape resonant area in the \(E_\mathrm{appl}\)-f (field intensity–field frequency) parameter space, where the neural network exhibits a high firing rate but weak synchronicity and low value of information entropy. Moreover, the effect of the electric field on the spatiotemporal activities of the neural network is detected in different connection fraction and network size. Our current work gives the insight into the effect of the external electric field on the spatiotemporal activities of the neural network.