Exact firing time statistics of neurons driven by discrete inhibitory noise

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 1577 - 15
• Main Authors: Olmi, Simona, Angulo-Garcia, David, Imparato, Alberto, Torcini, Alessandro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 08.05.2017; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 631/114/116/2393; 639/766/530; Action Potentials - physiology; Chaotic Dynamics; Coefficient of variation; Condensed Matter; Disordered Systems and Neural Networks; Electric Stimulation; Excitatory Postsynaptic Potentials; Firing pattern; Firing rate; Humanities and Social Sciences; Inhibitory Postsynaptic Potentials - physiology; Life Sciences; Models, Neurological; multidisciplinary; Nerve Net - physiology; Neural Inhibition - physiology; Neurons; Neurons - physiology; Neurons and Cognition; Nonlinear Sciences; Physics; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Statistics; Statistics as Topic; Synapses - physiology; Synaptic strength; Time Factors
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-01658-8

Neurons in the intact brain receive a continuous and irregular synaptic bombardment from excitatory and inhibitory pre- synaptic neurons, which determines the firing activity of the stimulated neuron. In order to investigate the influence of inhibitory stimulation on the firing time statistics, we consider Leaky Integrate-and-Fire neurons subject to inhibitory instantaneous post- synaptic potentials. In particular, we report exact results for the firing rate, the coefficient of variation and the spike train spectrum for various synaptic weight distributions. Our results are not limited to stimulations of infinitesimal amplitude, but they apply as well to finite amplitude post-synaptic potentials, thus being able to capture the effect of rare and large spikes. The developed methods are able to reproduce also the average firing properties of heterogeneous neuronal populations.