Scale-free and economical features of functional connectivity in neuronal networks

A form of activity that is highly studied in cultured cortical networks is the neuronal avalanche, characterized by bursts whose distribution follows a power law. While the statistics of neuronal avalanches are well characterized, much less is known about the neuronal interactions from which they arise. We examined statistical dependencies between pairs of cells in spontaneously active cultures of cortical neurons using an information measure of transfer entropy. We show that the distribution of transfer entropy follows a power law with a slope near 3/2. Using graph-theoretic approaches of weighted networks, we demonstrate that this power law maximizes a measure of global economy that accounts for both the efficiency of neuronal interactions as well as the overall traffic in the network. Finally, we describe a pairwise Poisson model that captures the statistics of information transfer in a population of spiking neurons. Using this model, we show that avalanches can occur in systems with weak pairwise interactions, and that strong pairwise interactions can arise without avalanches, suggesting that these two measures capture distinct properties of brain dynamics.