Pre-stimulus phase and amplitude regulation of phase-locked responses is maximized in the critical state
Abstract
Understanding why identical stimuli give differing neuronal responses and percepts is a central challenge in research on attention and consciousness. Ongoing oscillations reflect functional states that bias processing of incoming signals through amplitude and phase. It is not known, however, whether the effect of phase or amplitude on stimulus processing depends on the long-term global dynamics of the networks generating the oscillations. Here, we show, using a computational model, that the ability of networks to regulate stimulus response based on pre-stimulus activity requires near-critical dynamics—a dynamical state that emerges from networks with balanced excitation and inhibition, and that is characterized by scale-free fluctuations. We also find that networks exhibiting critical oscillations produce differing responses to the largest range of stimulus intensities. Thus, the brain may bring its dynamics close to the critical state whenever such network versatility is required.
Data availability
Source code required to run all simulations, as well as datasets and scripts required to generate all figures presented here, are available on figshare.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (612.001.123)
- Richard Hardstone
- Klaus Linkenkaer-Hansen
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (406.15.256)
- Arthur-Ervin Avramiea
- Klaus Linkenkaer-Hansen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Avramiea et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,132
- views
-
- 251
- downloads
-
- 18
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Changes in neural activity thought to reflect brain aging may be partly influenced by age-dependent signals ‘leaking’ from the heart.
-
- Evolutionary Biology
- Neuroscience
The cerebral cortex displays a bewildering diversity of shapes and sizes across and within species. Despite this diversity, we present a universal multi-scale description of primate cortices. We show that all cortical shapes can be described as a set of nested folds of different sizes. As neighbouring folds are gradually merged, the cortices of 11 primate species follow a common scale-free morphometric trajectory, that also overlaps with over 70 other mammalian species. Our results indicate that all cerebral cortices are approximations of the same archetypal fractal shape with a fractal dimension of df = 2.5. Importantly, this new understanding enables a more precise quantification of brain morphology as a function of scale. To demonstrate the importance of this new understanding, we show a scale-dependent effect of ageing on brain morphology. We observe a more than fourfold increase in effect size (from two standard deviations to eight standard deviations) at a spatial scale of approximately 2 mm compared to standard morphological analyses. Our new understanding may, therefore, generate superior biomarkers for a range of conditions in the future.