TY - JOUR T1 - Non-Additive Coupling Enables Propagation of Synchronous Spiking Activity in Purely Random Networks A1 - Memmesheimer, Raoul-Martin A1 - Timme, Marc Y1 - 2012/04/19 N2 - Author Summary Most nerve cells in neural circuits communicate by sending and receiving short stereotyped electrical pulses called action potentials or spikes. Recent neurophysiological experiments found that under certain conditions the neuronal dendrites (branched projections of the neuron that transmit inputs from other neurons to the cell body (soma)) process input spikes in a nonlinear way: If the inputs arrive within a time window of a few milliseconds, the dendrite can actively generate a dendritic spike that propagates to the neuronal soma and leads to a nonlinearly amplified response. This response is temporally highly precise. Here we consider an analytically tractable model of spiking neural circuits and study the impact of such dendritic nonlinearities on network activity. We find that synchronous spiking activity may robustly propagate through the network, even if it exhibits purely random connectivity without additionally superimposed structures. Such propagation may contribute to the generation of spike patterns that are currently discussed to encode information about internal states and external stimuli in neural circuits. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 8 IS - 4 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002384 SP - e1002384 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002384 ER -