Spontaneous Excitations in the Visual Cortex: Stripes, Spirals, Rings, and Collective Bursts

Abstract

As a simple model of the cortical sheet, we study a locally connected net of spiking neurons, Refractoriness, noise, axonal delays, and the time course of excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials are taken into account explicitly. In addition to a low-activity state and depending on the synaptic efficacy, four different scenarios evolve spontaneously, viz., stripes, spirals, rings, and collective bursts. Our results can be related to experimental observations of drug-induced epilepsy and hallucinations.