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Updated: Jul 7, 2026

Using Neuron Spiking Activity to Trigger Closed-Loop Stimuli in Neurophysiological Experiments
Published on: November 12, 2019
Reverberating activity in a neural network with distributed signal transmission delays
Takahiro Omi1, Shigeru Shinomoto
1Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan. omi@ton.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Abstract:
It is known that an identical delay in all transmission lines can destabilize the macroscopic stationarity of a neural network, causing oscillation. We analyze the collective dynamics of a network whose transmission delays are distributed in time. Here, a neuron is modeled as a discrete-time threshold element that responds in an all-or-nothing manner to a linear sum of signals that arrive after delays assigned to individual transmission lines. Even though transmission delays are distributed in time, a whole network exhibits a single collective oscillation with a period close to the average transmission delay. The collective oscillation cannot only be a simple alternation of the consecutive firing and resting, but also arbitrarily sequenced series of firing and resting, reverberating in a certain period of time. Moreover, the system dynamics can be made quasiperiodic or chaotic by changing the distribution of delays.
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