Neuronal Shot Noise and Brownian $1/f^2$ Behavior in the Local Field Potential

Abstract

We demonstrate that human electrophysiological recordings of the local field potential (LFP) from intracranial electrodes, acquired from a variety of cerebral regions, show a ubiquitous $1/f^2$ scaling within the power spectrum. We develop a quantitative model that treats the generation of these fields in an analogous way to that of electronic shot noise, and use this model to specifically address the cause of this $1/f^2$ Brownian noise. The model gives way to two analytically tractable solutions, both displaying Brownian noise: 1) uncorrelated cells that display sharp initial activity, whose extracellular fields slowly decay and 2) rapidly firing, temporally correlated cells that generate UP-DOWN states.

References in corpus (3)

• Dynamical synapses causing self-organized criticality in neural networks
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Frequency dependence of signal power and spatial reach of the local field potential
• The effect of ionic diffusion on extracellular potentials in neural tissue
• On 1/f^alpha power laws originating from linear neuronal cable theory: power spectral densities of the soma potential, transmembrane current and single-neuron contribution to the EEG
• Recovering Brownian and jump parts from high-frequency observations of a Lévy process
• A Scalable Real-Time Architecture for Neural Oscillation Detection and Phase-Specific Stimulation