Interaction with neighbors: Neuronal field simulates brain activity

Monday, September 27, 2010 - 08:28 in Psychology & Sociology

The appearance of a spot of light on the retina causes sudden activation of millions of neurons in the brain within tenths of milliseconds. At the first cortical processing stage, the primary visual cortex, each neuron thereby receives thousands of inputs from both close neighbors and further distant neurons, and also sends out an equal amount of output to others. In recent decades, individual characteristics of these widespread network connections and the specific transfer characteristics of single neurons have been widely derived. However, a coherent population model approach that provides an overall picture of the functional dynamics, subsuming interactions across all these individual channels, is still lacking. Now scientists in Germany have developed a computational model which allows a mathematical description of far reaching interactions between cortical neurons.

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