title: Oscillations and filtering networks support flexible routing of information.
abstract: The mammalian brain exhibits profuse interregional connectivity. How information flow is rapidly and flexibly switched among connected areas remains poorly understood. Task-dependent changes in the power and interregion coherence of network oscillations suggest that such oscillations play a role in signal routing. We show that switching one of several convergent pathways from an asynchronous to an oscillatory state allows accurate selective transmission of population-coded information, which can be extracted even when other convergent pathways fire asynchronously at comparable rates. We further show that the band-pass filtering required to perform this information extraction can be implemented in a simple spiking network model with a single feed-forward interneuron layer. This constitutes a mechanism for flexible signal routing in neural circuits, which exploits sparsely synchronized network oscillations and temporal filtering by feed-forward inhibition.
authors.affiliation: UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London, UK. t.akam@ion.ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Akam
authors.forename: Dimitri M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Kullmann
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D000818:Animals; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D009433:Neural Inhibition / Q000502:physiology; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*