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A dendritic mechanism for decoding traveling waves: principles and applications to motor cortex
Stewart Heitmann1, Tjeerd Boonstra, Michael Breakspear
1School of Psychiatry, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia ; The Black Dog Institute, Sydney, Australia.
Plos Computational Biology
|November 9, 2013
Summary
The cortex may encode information using traveling neuronal waves. A novel mechanism suggests dendritic receptors can decode these wave patterns, potentially explaining motor command transmission.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Computational Neuroscience
- Systems Neuroscience
Background:
- Traveling waves of neuronal oscillations are observed in cortical regions like the motor and sensory cortex.
- Their functional role in task-dependent modulation is debated.
- Current understanding lacks a clear mechanism for how the brain decodes information from these waves.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose and validate a novel neural mechanism for encoding and decoding information using traveling neuronal waves.
- To investigate how dendritic receptor fields act as spatial filters for wave patterns.
- To model the role of these mechanisms in the descending motor system for transmitting motor commands.
Main Methods:
- Conjecturing a mechanism where wave direction and wavelength encode information.
- Modeling dendritic receptor fields as spatial filters for neuronal wave patterns.
- Simulating pyramidal tract neurons in the motor cortex using existing field oscillation models.
- Investigating the impact of receptor field topology on response tuning to wave patterns.
- Analyzing control of wave patterns via intra-cortical connection topology.
Main Results:
- Demonstrated how receptor density distributions can act as spatial filters for wave patterns.
- Showed that dendritic mechanisms enable selective neuronal response to specific wave patterns.
- Validated the model in the descending motor system, replicating key findings in simple motor tasks.
- Observed variable interspike intervals and weak corticospinal coherence consistent with experimental data.
- Linked control of wave patterns to the topology of local intra-cortical connections.
Conclusions:
- Proposed a novel integrated neuronal model for encoding and decoding motor commands via traveling waves.
- Highlighted the role of dendritic receptor field spatial arrangement in decoding wave information.
- Suggested that the direction and wavelength of traveling waves are utilized for information encoding in the cortex.
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