Control of oscillations and chaos in canonical neocortical microcircuits

We investigate a canonical microcircuit containing four neurons: two interacting pyramidal neurons N1, N2 that form the basic computational circuit, a (stellate) control neuron N3, and a pyramidal neuron N4 acting as a reading-out device. Using in-vitro experiments, we experimentally prove that under generic input conditions, the computationally most relevant neurons N1, N2 are on limit-cycle solutions. We propose a novel coding scheme, which is established through along Arnold tongues-organized neuron synchronization, and use it to estimate the computational properties of the microcircuit