Topic: brain oscillations

NMC4 Short Talk: Synchronization in the Connectome: Metastable oscillatory modes emerge from interactions in the brain spacetime network

The brain exhibits a rich repertoire of oscillatory patterns organized in space, time and frequency. However, despite ever more-detailed characterizations of spectrally-resolved network patterns, the principles governing oscillatory activity at the system-level remain unclear. Here, we propose that the transient emergence of spatially organized brain rhythms are signatures of weakly stable synchronization between subsets of brain areas, naturally occurring at reduced collective frequencies due to the presence of time delays. To test this mechanism, we build a reduced network model representing interactions between local neuronal populations (with damped oscillatory response at 40Hz) coupled in the human neuroanatomical network. Following theoretical predictions, weakly stable cluster synchronization drives a rich repertoire of short-lived (or metastable) oscillatory modes, whose frequency inversely depends on the number of units, the strength of coupling and the propagation times. Despite the significant degree of reduction, we find a range of model parameters where the frequencies of collective oscillations fall in the range of typical brain rhythms, leading to an optimal fit of the power spectra of magnetoencephalographic signals from 89 heathy individuals. These findings provide a mechanistic scenario for the spontaneous emergence of frequency-specific long-range phase-coupling observed in magneto- and electroencephalographic signals as signatures of resonant modes emerging in the space-time structure of the Connectome, reinforcing the importance of incorporating realistic time delays in network models of oscillatory brain activity.

Hebbian learning, its inference, and brain oscillation

Despite the recent success of deep learning in artificial intelligence, the lack of biological plausibility and labeled data in natural learning still poses a challenge in understanding biological learning. At the other extreme lies Hebbian learning, the simplest local and unsupervised one, yet considered to be computationally less efficient. In this talk, I would introduce a novel method to infer the form of Hebbian learning from in vivo data. Applying the method to the data obtained from the monkey inferior temporal cortex for the recognition task indicates how Hebbian learning changes the dynamic properties of the circuits and may promote brain oscillation. Notably, recent electrophysiological data observed in rodent V1 showed that the effect of visual experience on direction selectivity was similar to that observed in monkey data and provided strong validation of asymmetric changes of feedforward and recurrent synaptic strengths inferred from monkey data. This may suggest a general learning principle underlying the same computation, such as familiarity detection across different features represented in different brain regions.

Sensorimotor brain oscillations in human toddlers