Collective behavior of cortico-thalamic circuits: Logic gates as the thalamus and a dynamical neuronal network as the cortex

Abstract

This paper introduces a two-layer network to investigate the effects of cortico-thalamic circuits on the cortexʼs collective behavior. In the brain, different parts of the cortex collaborate to process information. One of the main parts, which is the path of different cortex contacts, is the thalamus whose circuit is referred to as the “vertical” cortico-thalamic connectivity. Thalamus subnuclei can participate in the processing of the information that passes through them. It has been shown that they play the functional role of logic gates (AND, OR and XOR). To study how these thalamus circuits affect the cortical neuron behavior, a two-layer network is proposed wherein the cortex layer is composed of Hindmarsh–Rose models and the thalamus layer is constructed with logic gates. Results show that considering these logic gates can lead the network towards different synchronization, asynchronization, chimera and solitary patterns. It is revealed that for AND-gate and OR-gate, increasing the number of gates or their outputs can increase and decrease the networkʼs coherency in excitatory and inhibitory cases, respectively. However, considering XOR-gates always results in the chimera state.