Comment on “Two types of asynchronous activity in networks of excitatory and inhibitory spiking neurons”

Slow neural dynamics are believed to be important for behaviour, learning and memory [Churchland et al., 2007, Fee and Goldberg 2011]. Rate models operating in the chaotic regime show a rich dynamics at the scale of hundreds of milliseconds and provide remarkable learning capabilities [Sussillo and Abbott, 2009, Toyoizumi and Abbott, 2011, Barak et al., 2013]. However, neurons in the brain communicate via spikes and it is a major challenge in computational neuroscience to obtain similar slow rate dynamics in networks of spiking neuron models\n\nThis question was recently addressed in a paper by Ostojic (2014) published in Nature Neuroscience [Ostojic, 2014]. It argues that an \"unstructured, sparsely connected network of model spiking neurons can display two fundamentally different types of asynchronous activity\". When the synaptic strength is increased, two-pop ...