Credit: Leandro Alonso
Simple neural circuits composed of two interacting populations of neurons exhibit a remarkable capacity to accommodate multiple nonlinear resonances organized in stunningly diverse and intriguing diagrams. The figure shows the locking diagrams of six different circuits tuned to exhibit this property. When driven by periodic input, the circuits can be entrained in the different subharmonic regimes indicated by different colors. In these circuits, small modulations of the periodic input may result in qualitatively different stable rhythms. This provides a strategy to obtain a diversity of waveforms with multiple time scales out of the nonlinear interaction of the neural populations and their intrinsic dynamics.