Topic: cortical response nonlinearities

Excitatory and inhibitory inputs to cortical neurons remain balanced across different conditions. The balanced network model (Van Vreeswijk & Sompolinsky 1998) provides a self-consistent account of this observation: under mild inequality conditions on connectivity parameters, population rates dynamically adjust to yield a state in which inputs to all neurons are tightly balanced, keeping all populations active at biological levels. Global tight balance, however, predicts a linear stimulus-dependence for population responses and cannot explain systematic cortical response nonlinearities