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

Abstract

Networks of excitatory and inhibitory neurons form the basic computational units in the mammalian cortex. Within the dominant paradigm, neurons in such networks encode and process information by asynchronously emitting action potentials. In a recent publication, I argued that unstructured, sparsely connected networks of integrate-and-fire neurons display a transition between two qualitatively different types of asynchronous activity as the synaptic coupling is increased. A comment by Engelken et al (bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/017798) disputes this finding. Here I provide additional evidence for a transition between two qualitatively different types of asynchronous activity and address the criticism raised in the comment. The claims that the original paper is \"factually incorrect\" and \"conceptually misleading\" are unsubstantiated and inappropriate.