Local inhibitory plasticity tunes global brain dynamics and allows the emergence of functional brain networks

Abstract

Rich, spontaneous brain activity has been observed across a range of different temporal and spatial scales. These dynamics are thought to be important t for efficient neural functioning. Experimental evidence suggests that these neural dynamics are maintained across a variety of different cognitive states, in response to alterations of the environment and to changes in brain configuration (e.g., across individuals, development and in many neurological disorders). This suggests that the brain has evolved mechanisms to stabilize dynamics and maintain them across a range of situations. Here, we employ a local homeostatic inhibitory plasticity mechanism, balancing inhibitory and excitatory activity in a model of macroscopic brain activity based on white-matter structural connectivity. We demonstrate that the addition of homeostatic plasticity regulates network activity and allows for the emergence of rich, spontaneous dynamics across a range of brain configurations. Furthermore, the presence of homeostatic plasticity maximises the overlap between empirical and simulated patterns of functional connectivity. Therefore, this work presents a simple, local, biologically plausible inhibitory mechanism that allows stable dynamics to emerge in the brain and which facilitates the formation of functional connectivity networks.

References in corpus (5)

• Dynamical synapses causing self-organized criticality in neural networks
• Brain organization into resting state networks emerges at criticality on a model of the human connectome
• Failure of adaptive self-organized criticality during epileptic seizure attacks
• Adaptive self-organization in a realistic neural network model
• Dynamical and Statistical Criticality in a Model of Neural Tissue