Topic: conduction delays

Within the broad theme of brain plasticity, this work explores a dimension that has not received as much research attention thus far - activity dependent changes in myelin. Myelin acts to speed up axonal conduction. Until recently, the dogma of the field was that myelination was part of a developmental program that set up the neural circuitry, after which it remained static; however, the past decade of research has begun to reveal that myelin plasticity continues well into adulthood, is modulated in an activity dependent manner, and contributes to skill learning. The first part of our study is

Biological neuronal networks exhibit hallmark features such as oscillatory dynamics, heterogeneity, modularity, and conduction delays. However, it has remained unclear to what extent these serve computational purposes. Inspired by physiological findings, we simulate recurrent networks of damped harmonic oscillators (DHO) in which one network node represents the aggregate activity of an underlying E-I circuit such as a cortical column (HORNs, see figure), at the same time reducing single-node oscillatory dynamics to its most basic form. We successively endow the networks with additional biologi