Departament de Física, Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC), Colom 11, E-08222 Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain.
Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona, Doctor Aiguader 88, E-08003 Barcelona, Spain.
Phys Rev E. 2018 Jan;97(1-1):012204. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.97.012204.
At the mesoscopic scale, the brain can be understood as a collection of interacting neuronal oscillators, but the extent to which its sustained activity is due to coupling among brain areas is still unclear. Here we address this issue in a simplified situation by examining the effect of coupling between two cortical columns described via Jansen-Rit neural mass models. Our results show that coupling between the two neuronal populations gives rise to stochastic initiations of sustained collective activity, which can be interpreted as epileptic events. For large enough coupling strengths, termination of these events results mainly from the emergence of synchronization between the columns, and thus it is controlled by coupling instead of noise. Stochastic triggering and noise-independent durations are characteristic of excitable dynamics, and thus we interpret our results in terms of collective excitability.
在介观尺度上，大脑可以被理解为相互作用的神经元振荡器的集合，但大脑的持续活动在多大程度上是由于大脑区域之间的耦合仍然不清楚。在这里，我们通过研究通过 Jansen-Rit 神经质量模型描述的两个皮质柱之间的耦合的影响，在简化的情况下解决了这个问题。我们的结果表明，两个神经元群体之间的耦合导致持续集体活动的随机启动，这可以解释为癫痫事件。对于足够大的耦合强度，这些事件的终止主要是由于柱之间的同步出现，因此它是由耦合而不是噪声控制的。随机触发和与噪声无关的持续时间是兴奋性动力学的特征，因此我们根据集体兴奋性来解释我们的结果。
