title: Sudden synchrony leaps accompanied by frequency multiplications in neuronal activity.
abstract: A classical view of neural coding relies on temporal firing synchrony among functional groups of neurons, however, the underlying mechanism remains an enigma. Here we experimentally demonstrate a mechanism where time-lags among neuronal spiking leap from several tens of milliseconds to nearly zero-lag synchrony. It also allows sudden leaps out of synchrony, hence forming short epochs of synchrony. Our results are based on an experimental procedure where conditioned stimulations were enforced on circuits of neurons embedded within a large-scale network of cortical cells in vitro and are corroborated by simulations of neuronal populations. The underlying biological mechanisms are the unavoidable increase of the neuronal response latency to ongoing stimulations and temporal or spatial summation required to generate evoked spikes. These sudden leaps in and out of synchrony may be accompanied by multiplications of the neuronal firing frequency, hence offering reliable information-bearing indicators which may bridge between the two principal neuronal coding paradigms.
authors.affiliation: Gonda Interdisciplinary Brain Research Center and the Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, Israel.
authors.forename: Roni
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vardi
authors.forename: Amir
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Goldental
authors.forename: Shoshana
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Guberman
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kalmanovich
authors.forename: Hagar
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Marmari
authors.forename: Ido
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kanter
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D003198:Computer Simulation; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley
keywords: firing synchrony; in vitro modular networks; network; neuronal circuit; topology