Topic: independent inputs

Cortical circuits exhibit complex activity patterns, both spontaneously and evoked by external stimuli. Information encoding and learning in neural circuits depend on how well time-varying stimuli can control network activity. We show that in firing-rate networks in the balanced state, external control of recurrent dynamics, i.e., the suppression of the internally-generated chaotic variability, strongly depends on correlations in the input: One might expect that driving all neurons with a common input helps to control network dynamics. Surprisingly, we find that the network is far easier to co