AnimatLab: Endogenous Bursting Neurons

This tutorial describes how to create endogenous bursting neurons within the AnimatLab simulation environment (http://animatlab.com). AnimatLab is a neuromechanical simulation system that allows you to build a physically accurate, biomechanical model of the body an organism. Hill muscle models within that body can be controlled using biologically realistic neural networks to reproduce behaviors found in the real animals.

Some neurons have a tendency to produce rhythmic or quasi-rhythmic activity without input from any other neurons. If a neuron produces spontaneous rhythmic bursts of spikes when it is totally isolated from all other neurons, it is known as an endogenous burster.

There is another class of neurons called conditional bursters which can produce rhythmic bursts of spikes in isolation, but only if the correct combination of neuromodulatory substances is present in the bathing medium.

Finally, there are neurons which are not spontaneously rhythmically active, but which produce a sustained depolarisation, and hence a single bursts of spikes, in response to a brief depolarising inputs Such sustained depolarisations are called plateau potentials.

There are several different mechanisms which can give a neuron properties such as these; but they all share the basic features of a relatively slow, voltage-dependent regenerative depolarising current and which in turn activates a slow restorative hyperpolarising current .

The neural model used in animatlab implements one of the simplest such mechanisms - a slow voltage-activated calcium current which has even slower voltage-inactivation. This is probably over simplistic, but it gives a good first approximation to bursting mechanisms.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to build endogenously bursting neurons for use in your AnimatLab projects.

Видео AnimatLab: Endogenous Bursting Neurons канала NeuroRoboticTech