Van der Pol oscillator networks

There is much excitement these days in attempting to answer some challenging questions formulated by neurobiologists for which answers are expected to come from systems theorists. One such question is on how to decode information contained in spike trains generated in the cortex. In this paper, we report some initial findings about the spiking behavior of coupled Van der Pol oscillator networks. The Van der Pol oscillator is one of the simplest forms of nonlinear oscillators, and every student in dynamics come across this in the study of limit cycles and bifurcation. What is perhaps not so commonly known is that when the parameter μ of the equation is large, then rather than oscillations, such as sinusoidal waves, the signal produced takes the form of a periodic spike train. We show that, by using a coupled network of Van der Pol oscillators, it is possible to generate a very rich array of spike trains