Browsing by Author "Hansel, David"
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Item Open Access On the distribution of firing rates in networks of cortical neurons.(The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2011-11) Roxin, Alex; Brunel, Nicolas; Hansel, David; Mongillo, Gianluigi; van Vreeswijk, CarlThe distribution of in vivo average firing rates within local cortical networks has been reported to be highly skewed and long tailed. The distribution of average single-cell inputs, conversely, is expected to be Gaussian by the central limit theorem. This raises the issue of how a skewed distribution of firing rates might result from a symmetric distribution of inputs. We argue that skewed rate distributions are a signature of the nonlinearity of the in vivo f-I curve. During in vivo conditions, ongoing synaptic activity produces significant fluctuations in the membrane potential of neurons, resulting in an expansive nonlinearity of the f-I curve for low and moderate inputs. Here, we investigate the effects of single-cell and network parameters on the shape of the f-I curve and, by extension, on the distribution of firing rates in randomly connected networks.