Heterogeneous Synaptic Weighting Improves Neural Coding in the Presence of Common Noise

Descending pathways increase sensory neural response heterogeneity to facilitate decoding and behavior

The functional role of heterogeneous spiking responses of otherwise similarly tuned neurons to stimulation, which has been observed ubiquitously, remains unclear to date. Here, we demonstrate that such response heterogeneity serves a beneficial function that is used by downstream brain areas to generate behavioral responses that follows the detailed timecourse of the stimulus. Multi-unit recordings from sensory pyramidal cells within the electrosensory system of Apteronotus leptorhynchus were performed and revealed highly heterogeneous responses that were similar for all cell types. By comparing the coding properties of a given neural population before and after inactivation of descending pathways, we found that heterogeneities were beneficial as decoding was then more robust to the addition of noise. Taken together, our results not only reveal that descending pathways actively promote response heterogeneity within a given cell type, but also uncover a beneficial function for such heterogeneity that is used by the brain to generate behavior.

Extreme multistability and phase synchronization in a heterogeneous bi-neuron Rulkov network with memristive electromagnetic induction

Memristive electromagnetic induction effect has been widely explored in bi-neuron network with homogeneous neurons, but rarely in bi-neuron network with heterogeneous ones. This paper builds a bi-neuron network by coupling heterogeneous Rulkov neurons with memristor and investigates the memristive electromagnetic induction effect. Theoretical analysis discloses that the bi-neuron network possesses a line equilibrium state and its stability depends on the memristor coupling strength and initial condition. That is, the stability of the line equilibrium state has a transition between unstable saddle-focus and stable node-focus via Hopf bifurcation. By employing parameters located in the stable node-focus region, dynamical behaviors related to the memristor coupling strength and initial conditions are revealed by Julia- and MATLAB-based multiple numerical tools. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed heterogeneous bi-neuron Rulkov network can generate point attractor, period, chaos, chaos crisis, and period-doubling bifurcation. Note that extreme multistability are disclosed with respect to initial conditions of memristor and gated ion concentration. Coexisting infinitely multiple firing patterns of periodic firing patterns with different periodicities and chaotic firing patterns for different memristor initial conditions are demonstrated by phase portrait and time-domain waveform. Besides, the phase synchronization related to the memristor coupling strength and its initial condition is explored, which suggests that the two heterogeneous neurons become phase synchronization with large memristor coupling strength and initial condition. This also reflects that the plasticity of memristor synapse enables adaptive regulation in keeping energy balance between the neurons. What's more, MCU-based hardware experiments are executed to further confirm the numerical simulations.