PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Erik J Peterson
AU  - Bradley Voytek
TI  - The trade-off between neural computation and oscillatory coordination
AID  - 10.1101/309427
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 309427
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/27/309427.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/27/309427.full
AB  - Oscillations can improve neural coding by grouping action potentials into synchronous windows, but this same effect harms coding when action potentials become over-synchronized. Diseases ranging from Parkinson’s to epilepsy suggest that over-synchronization can lead to pathology, but the precise boundary separating healthy from pathological synchrony remains an open theoretical problem. We address this in series of numerical experiments. We study a simple model that shows how error in individual cells’ computations is traded for population-level synchronization. In this model we conceive of a “voltage budget” where instantaneous moments of membrane voltage can be partitioned into oscillatory and computational terms. In comparing these budget terms we suggest a new set of biologically measurable inequalities that separate healthy from pathological synchrony. Finally, we derive an optimal non-biological algorithm for exchanging computational error with population synchrony.