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arXiv · 2203.16374

The excitatory-inhibitory branching process: a parsimonious view of cortical asynchronous states, excitability, and criticality

Roberto Corral López·Victor Buendía·Miguel A. Muñoz
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Abstract

The branching process is the minimal model for propagation dynamics, avalanches and criticality, broadly used in neuroscience. A simple extension of it, adding inhibitory nodes, induces a much-richer phenomenology, including, an intermediate phase, between quiescence and saturation, that exhibits the key features of "asynchronous states" in cortical networks. Remarkably, in the inhibition-dominated case, it exhibits an extremely-rich phase diagram, that captures a wealth of non-trivial features of spontaneous brain activity, such as collective excitability, hysteresis, tilted avalanche shapes, and partial synchronization, allowing us to rationalize striking empirical findings within a common and parsimonious framework.

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Roberto Corral López, Victor Buendía, Miguel A. Muñoz. 2022-03-30. The excitatory-inhibitory branching process: a parsimonious view of cortical asynchronous states, excitability, and criticality. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16374

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