Oscillations and filtering networks support flexible routing of information

Neuron. 2010 Jul 29;67(2):308-20. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.06.019.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Action Potentials / physiology
  • Animals
  • Computer Simulation
  • Fourier Analysis
  • Humans
  • Models, Neurological*
  • Nerve Net / physiology
  • Neural Inhibition / physiology
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Neurons / physiology*