A Mechanism for Synaptic Copy Between Neural Circuits.

Journal: Neural computation
PMID:

Abstract

Cortical oscillations are central to information transfer in neural systems. Significant evidence supports the idea that coincident spike input can allow the neural threshold to be overcome and spikes to be propagated downstream in a circuit. Thus, an observation of oscillations in neural circuits would be an indication that repeated synchronous spiking may be enabling information transfer. However, for memory transfer, in which synaptic weights must be being transferred from one neural circuit (region) to another, what is the mechanism? Here, we present a synaptic transfer mechanism whose structure provides some understanding of the phenomena that have been implicated in memory transfer, including nested oscillations at various frequencies. The circuit is based on the principle of pulse-gated, graded information transfer between neural populations.

Authors

  • Yuxiu Shao
    Center for Bioinformatics, National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
  • Binxu Wang
    Center for Bioinformatics, National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China, and Neuroscience Program, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, U.S.A. lio50328@126.com.
  • Andrew T Sornborger
    Information Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, U.S.A. sornborg@lanl.gov.
  • Louis Tao
    Center for Bioinformatics, National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China. taolt@mail.cbi.pku.edu.cn.