Abstract
Oscillations can improve neural coding by grouping action potentials into synchronous windows of activity, but this same effect can harm coding when action potentials become over-synchronized. Diseases ranging from Parkinson’s to epilepsy suggest that oversynchronization leads to pathology, but the precise boundary separating healthy from pathological synchrony remains an open theoretical problem. Here we study a simple model that shows how error in individual cells’ computations is traded for population-level synchronization. To put the in biological terms accessible to the cell we conceive of a “voltage budget” where instantaneous moments of membrane voltage can be partitioned into oscillatory and computational terms. By comparing these budget terms we derive a new set of biologically measurable inequalities that bound healthy from pathological synchrony. Finally, we derive an optimal non-biological algorithm for exchanging computational error with population synchrony.
Footnotes
EJP and BV designed the study and wrote manuscript. EJP implemented the model and conducted the analysis.
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.