How neural circuits achieve and use stable dynamics

The brain consists of many interconnected networks with time-varying activity. There are multiple sources of noise and variation yet activity has to eventually converge to a stable state for its computations to make sense. We approached this from a control-theory perspective by applying contraction analysis to recurrent neural networks. This allowed us to find mechanisms for achieving stability in multiple connected networks with biologically realistic dynamics, including synaptic plasticity and time-varying inputs. These mechanisms included anti-Hebbian plasticity, synaptic sparsity and excitatory-inhibitory balance. We leveraged these findings to construct networks that could perform functionally relevant computations in the presence of noise and disturbance. Our work provides a blueprint for how to construct stable plastic and distributed networks.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2019-06-11

• Fields of study

  Biology, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/668152
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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