A reservoir of timescales emerges in recurrent circuits with heterogeneous neural assemblies

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
Metrics

Abstract

The temporal activity of many physical and biological systems, from complex networks to neural circuits, exhibits fluctuations simultaneously varying over a large range of timescales. Long-tailed distributions of intrinsic timescales have been observed across neurons simultaneously recorded within the same cortical circuit. The mechanisms leading to this striking temporal heterogeneity are yet unknown. Here we show that neural circuits, endowed with heterogeneous neural assemblies of different sizes, naturally generate multiple timescales of activity spanning several orders of magnitude. We develop an analytical theory using rate networks, supported by simulations of spiking network with cell-type specific connectivity, to explain how neural timescales depend on assembly size and show that our model can naturally explain the long-tailed timescale distribution observed in awake primate cortex. When driving recurrent networks of heterogeneous neural assemblies by a time-dependent broadband input, we found that large and small assemblies preferentially entrain slow and fast spectral components of the input, respectively. Our results suggest that heterogeneous assemblies can provide a biologically plausible mechanism for neural circuits to demix complex temporal input signals by transforming temporal into spatial neural codes via frequency-selective neural assemblies.

Data availability

https://github.com/nistrate/multipleTimescalesRNN

The following previously published data sets were used

(2020) Data from: Autocorrelation structure at rest predicts value correlates of single neurons during reward-guided choice
Dryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.5b331.

https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5b331

Article and author information

Author details

Merav Stern

Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalemn, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Nicolae Istrate

Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Luca Mazzucato

Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, United States

For correspondence
lmazzuca@uoregon.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8525-7539

Funding

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01-NS118461)

Luca Mazzucato

National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01-DA055439)

Luca Mazzucato

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

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.