Chaos in neuronal networks with balanced excitatory and inhibitory activity.

Neurons in the cortex of behaving animals show temporally irregular spiking patterns. The origin of this irregularity and its implications for neural processing are unknown. The hypothesis that the temporal variability in the firing of a neuron results from an approximate balance between its excitatory and inhibitory inputs was investigated theoretically. Such a balance emerges naturally in large networks of excitatory and inhibitory neuronal populations that are sparsely connected by relatively strong synapses. The resulting state is characterized by strongly chaotic dynamics, even when the external inputs to the network are constant in time. Such a network exhibits a linear response, despite the highly nonlinear dynamics of single neurons, and reacts to changing external stimuli on time scales much smaller than the integration time constant of a single neuron.