Noise-activated barrier crossing in multiattractor dissipative neural networks

Noise-activated transitions between coexisting attractors are investigated in a chaotic spiking network. At low noise level, attractor hopping consists of discrete bifurcation events that conserve the memory of initial conditions. When the escape probability becomes comparable to the intrabasin hopping probability, the lifetime of attractors is given by a detailed balance where the less coherent attractors act as a sink for the more coherent ones. In this regime, the escape probability follows an activation law allowing us to assign pseudoactivation energies to limit cycle attractors. These pseudoenergies introduce a useful metric for evaluating the resilience of biological rhythms to perturbations.