Neural Masses And Fields Modelling The Dynamics Of Brain Activity

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Neural Masses and Fields: Modelling the Dynamics of Brain Activity

Biophysical modelling of brain activity has a long and illustrious history and has recently profited from technological advances that furnish neuroimaging data at an unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution. Neuronal modelling is a very active area of research, with applications ranging from the characterization of neurobiological and cognitive processes, to constructing artificial brains in silico and building brain-machine interface and neuroprosthetic devices. Biophysical modelling has always benefited from interdisciplinary interactions between different and seemingly distant fields; ranging from mathematics and engineering to linguistics and psychology. This Research Topic aims to promote such interactions by promoting papers that contribute to a deeper understanding of neural activity as measured by fMRI or electrophysiology. In general, mean field models of neural activity can be divided into two classes: neural mass and neural field models. The main difference between these classes is that field models prescribe how a quantity characterizing neural activity (such as average depolarization of a neural population) evolves over both space and time as opposed to mass models, which characterize activity over time only; by assuming that all neurons in a population are located at (approximately) the same point. This Research Topic focuses on both classes of models and considers several aspects and their relative merits that: span from synapses to the whole brain; comparisons of their predictions with EEG and MEG spectra of spontaneous brain activity; evoked responses, seizures, and fitting data - to infer brain states and map physiological parameters.
Neural Fields

Neural field theory has a long-standing tradition in the mathematical and computational neurosciences. Beginning almost 50 years ago with seminal work by Griffiths and culminating in the 1970ties with the models of Wilson and Cowan, Nunez and Amari, this important research area experienced a renaissance during the 1990ties by the groups of Ermentrout, Robinson, Bressloff, Wright and Haken. Since then, much progress has been made in both, the development of mathematical and numerical techniques and in physiological refinement und understanding. In contrast to large-scale neural network models described by huge connectivity matrices that are computationally expensive in numerical simulations, neural field models described by connectivity kernels allow for analytical treatment by means of methods from functional analysis. Thus, a number of rigorous results on the existence of bump and wave solutions or on inverse kernel construction problems are nowadays available. Moreover, neural fields provide an important interface for the coupling of neural activity to experimentally observable data, such as the electroencephalogram (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). And finally, neural fields over rather abstract feature spaces, also called dynamic fields, found successful applications in the cognitive sciences and in robotics. Up to now, research results in neural field theory have been disseminated across a number of distinct journals from mathematics, computational neuroscience, biophysics, cognitive science and others. There is no comprehensive collection of results or reviews available yet. With our proposed book Neural Field Theory, we aim at filling this gap in the market. We received consent from some of the leading scientists in the field, who are willing to write contributions for the book, among them are two of the founding-fathers of neural field theory: Shun-ichi Amari and Jack Cowan.
Nonlinear Dynamics in Computational Neuroscience

This book provides an essential overview of computational neuroscience. It addresses a broad range of aspects, from physiology to nonlinear dynamical approaches to understanding neural computation, and from the simulation of brain circuits to the development of engineering devices and platforms for neuromorphic computation. Written by leading experts in such diverse fields as neuroscience, physics, psychology, neural engineering, cognitive science and applied mathematics, the book reflects the remarkable advances that have been made in the field of computational neuroscience, an emerging discipline devoted to the study of brain functions in terms of the information-processing properties of the structures forming the nervous system. The contents build on the workshop “Nonlinear Dynamics in Computational Neuroscience: from Physics and Biology to ICT,” which was held in Torino, Italy in September 2015.