A bifurcation of a synchronous oscillations into a torus in a system of two mutually inhibitory aVLSI neurons: experimental observation

Synchronized firing of FitzHugh-Nagumo neurons by noise

We investigate the influence of noise on synchronization between the spiking activities of neurons with external impulsive forces. We first analyze the dependence of the synchronized firing on the amplitude and the angular frequency of the impulsive force in the noise-free system. Three cases (regular spiking, traveling wave, and chaotic spiking) with low synchronized firing are chosen to study effects due to noise. In each case we find that small noise can be a promoter of synchronization phenomena in neural activities, by choosing an appropriate noise intensity acting on some of the neurons.

Bifurcation of synchronous oscillations into torus in a system of two reciprocally inhibitory silicon neurons: experimental observation and modeling

Oscillatory activity in the central nervous system is associated with various functions, like motor control, memory formation, binding, and attention. Quasiperiodic oscillations are rarely discussed in the neurophysiological literature yet they may play a role in the nervous system both during normal function and disease. Here we use a physical system and a model to explore scenarios for how quasiperiodic oscillations might arise in neuronal networks. An oscillatory system of two mutually inhibitory neuronal units is a ubiquitous network module found in nervous systems and is called a half-center oscillator. Previously we created a half-center oscillator of two identical oscillatory silicon (analog Very Large Scale Integration) neurons and developed a mathematical model describing its dynamics. In the mathematical model, we have shown that an in-phase limit cycle becomes unstable through a subcritical torus bifurcation. However, the existence of this torus bifurcation in experimental silicon two-neuron system was not rigorously demonstrated or investigated. Here we demonstrate the torus predicted by the model for the silicon implementation of a half-center oscillator using complex time series analysis, including bifurcation diagrams, mapping techniques, correlation functions, amplitude spectra, and correlation dimensions, and we investigate how the properties of the quasiperiodic oscillations depend on the strengths of coupling between the silicon neurons. The potential advantages and disadvantages of quasiperiodic oscillations (torus) for biological neural systems and artificial neural networks are discussed.