Homeostatic plasticity and the maintenance of neural dynamics in a changing world: converging theoretical and experimental approaches. (360G-Wellcome-106092_Z_14_Z)

Recent experimental work provides suggests that spontaneous activity of the brain is organised as an approximately critical system with the dynamics of the system in an attractor state between order and disorder. In many natural examples of critical dynamics, critical activity is maintained for only a small range of environmental conditions according to a tuning parameter, dependent on specific aspects of the organisation of the system (e.g., network topology). How the brain maintains and explo its critical dynamics over a range of diverse environments (homeostasis) is unclear; however, theoretical work suggests that some form of synaptic plasticity is likely to be an important mechanism for tuning critical neural dynamics [9,10]. The key goals of this fellowship will be to combine dynamic mean field computational models [11-13] with models of homeostatic plasticity based on excitatory/inhibitory balance [14,15] to show how criticality can be maintained with a changing environment. The model will be evaluated against existing functional neuroimaging data and electrophysiological datasets, during environmental change (both over short and long time scales). This data will allow assessment of model predictions at multiple temporal and spatial scales.