title: Controlling neural network responsiveness: tradeoffs and constraints.
abstract: In recent years much effort is invested in means to control neural population responses at the whole brain level, within the context of developing advanced medical applications. The tradeoffs and constraints involved, however, remain elusive due to obvious complications entailed by studying whole brain dynamics. Here, we present effective control of response features (probability and latency) of cortical networks in vitro over many hours, and offer this approach as an experimental toy for studying controllability of neural networks in the wider context. Exercising this approach we show that enforcement of stable high activity rates by means of closed loop control may enhance alteration of underlying global input-output relations and activity dependent dispersion of neuronal pair-wise correlations across the network.
authors.affiliation: Network Biology Research Laboratory, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel ; Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel.
authors.forename: Hanna
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Keren
authors.affiliation: Network Biology Research Laboratory, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel ; Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel.
authors.forename: Shimon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Marom
keywords: closed loop; control; electrophysiology; multi-electrode array; neural network; response fluctuations; stability