The authors develop a model to describe the emergence of extreme coherent events in coupled excitable systems, specifically neuronal networks, and show that activity small ensemble neurons can be strongly amplified by connectivity noise.

Music neurotechnology is a new research area emerging at the crossroads of neurobiology, engineering sciences and music. Examples of ongoing research into this new area include the development of brain-computer interfaces to control music systems and systems for automatic classification of sounds informed by the neurobiology of the human auditory apparatus. The authors introduce neurogranular s...

The brain can be thought of as a collective ensemble ranging in the spatial domain from microscopic elements (molecules, receptors, ionic channels, synapses) to macroscopic entities (layers, nuclei, cortical areas, neural networks) (Figure 1). The same multi-scale analysis can be replicated in the temporal domain, when decomposing brain activity in a multitude of dynamic processes with time con...

..............................................................................................xi Preface .............................................................................................. xiii Acknowledgements...........................................................................xix SECTION 1: IN VITRO CULTURED NEURONAL NETWORKS COUPLED TO MICRO-ELECTRODE ARRAYS: A NEUROENGINEER...

Spatially organised neuronal networks have wide reaching applications, including fundamental research, toxicology testing, pharmaceutical screening and the realisation of neuronal implant interfaces. Despite the large number of methods catalogued in the literature there remains the need to identify a method that delivers high pattern compliance, long-term stability and is widely accessible to n...

Brains perform with remarkable efficiency, are capable of prodigious computation, and are marvels of communication. We are beginning to understand some of the geometric, biophysical, and energy constraints that have governed the evolution of cortical networks. To operate efficiently within these constraints, nature has optimized the structure and function of cortical networks with design princi...

Neuronal networks process information in parallel. The cortex can be viewed as a computational surface that creates and maintains dynamic maps of representations of important sensorimotor and higher-level aspects of the environment and the organism. Its functions can be modeled by a particular type of neural network, the self-organizing feature map. Most importantly, representations of informat...

The main objective of this paper is to examine evidence for the concept that epileptic activity should be envisaged in terms of functional connectivity and dynamics of neuronal networks. Basic concepts regarding structure and dynamics of neuronal networks are briefly described. Particular attention is given to approaches that are derived, or related, to the concept of causality, as formulated b...

Synaptic plasticity is a central theme in neuroscience. A framework of three-factor learning rules provides a powerful abstraction, helping to navigate through the abundance of models of synaptic plasticity. It is well-known that the dopamine modulation of learning is related to reward, but theoretical models predict other functional roles of the modulatory third factor; it may encode errors fo...