Definition
Spatiotemporal patterns comprised of local neuronal activity events that follow scale-invariant statistics. Pattern statistics is quantified by a power law distribution in pattern size, s, and pattern duration, t. The balanced propagation of activity during avalanche unfolding takes on the form of a branching process. Specifically, the probability distribution P(s) takes the functional form of a power law P(s) ~ s−α, with exponent α = 3/2, and P(t) ~ s−β with β = 2. The branching parameter, σ, estimated by the ratio of future to current events during an avalanche is critical, i.e., σ = 1. On average, neuronal activity neither grows nor decreases during avalanching.
Detailed Description
History of Neuronal Avalanches
Experimentally, neuronal avalanches were first identified in 2003 in the spontaneous activity of cortex slice cultures and...
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIMH ZIAMH002797 (Plenz) and by National Science Foundation CRCNS grant #1308174 (Shew) and by Arkansas Biosciences Institute grants 0055 and 0070 (Shew). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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Plenz, D., Shew, W. (2018). Neuronal Avalanches. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_743-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_743-4
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Neuronal Avalanches- Published:
- 03 September 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_743-4
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- 08 February 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_743-3