A large-scale computational model of the basal ganglia network and thalamus is proposed to describe movement disorders and treatment effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS). The model of this complex network considers three areas of the basal ganglia region: the subthalamic nucleus (STN) as target area of DBS, the globus pallidus, both pars externa and pars interna (GPe-GPi), and...
Natural phenomena can be quantitatively described by means of mathematics, which is actually the only way of doing so. Physics is a convincing example of the mathematization of nature. This paper gives an answer to the question of how mathematization of nature is done and illustrates the answer. Here nature is to be taken in a wide sense, being a substantial object of study in...
Facing the threat of rapidly worsening water quality, there is an urgent need to develop novel approaches of monitoring its global supplies and early detection of environmental fluctuations. Global warming, urban growth and other factors have threatened not only the freshwater supply but also the well-being of many species inhabiting it. Traditionally, laboratory-based studies...
The Wilson–Cowan equations were developed to provide a simplified yet powerful description of neural network dynamics. As such, they embraced nonlinear dynamics, but in an interpretable form. Most importantly, it was the first mathematical formulation to emphasize the significance of interactions between excitatory and inhibitory neural populations, thereby incorporating both...
In so-called interactive biorobotics, robotic models of living systems interact with animals in controlled experimental settings. By observing how the focal animal reacts to the stimuli delivered by the robot, one tests hypotheses concerning the determinants of animal behaviour in social contexts. Building on previous methodological reconstructions of interactive biorobotics...
In several papers published in Biological Cybernetics in the 1980s and 1990s, Kawato and colleagues proposed computational models explaining how internal models are acquired in the cerebellum. These models were later supported by neurophysiological experiments using monkeys and neuroimaging experiments involving humans. These early studies influenced neuroscience from basic...
Noise in spiking neurons is commonly modeled by a noisy input current or by generating output spikes stochastically with a voltage-dependent hazard rate (“escape noise”). While input noise lends itself to modeling biophysical noise processes, the phenomenological escape noise is mathematically more tractable. Using the level-crossing theory for differentiable Gaussian processes...
More and more, the neurosciences and the sciences concerned with mind and cognition are burying fundamental questions under layers of professional methodology. I therefore welcome Biological Cybernetics’ invitation to comment on two of my papers, (von der Malsburg 1973) and (von der Malsburg and Schneider 1986) (henceforth referred to as (I) and (II)) as an opportunity to address...
We celebrate the 60th anniversary of Biological Cybernetics. It has also been 30 years since “Self-organized control of bipedal locomotion by neural oscillators in unpredictable environment” was published in Biological Cybernetics (Taga et al. in Biol Cybern 65(3):147–159, 1991). I would like to look back on the creation of this paper and discuss its subsequent development and...
Neural circuits contain a wide variety of interneuron types, which differ in their biophysical properties and connectivity patterns. The two most common interneuron types, parvalbumin-expressing and somatostatin-expressing cells, have been shown to be differentially involved in many cognitive functions. These cell types also show different relationships with the power and phase...
This article presents a brief retrospective on the Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model of certain dynamical properties of human movement. Though unanticipated, HKB introduced, and demonstrated the power of, a new vocabulary for understanding behavior, cognition and the brain, revealed through a visually compelling mathematical picture that accommodated highly reproducible experimental...
African weakly electric fish communicate at night by constantly emitting and perceiving brief electrical signals (electric organ discharges, EOD) at variable inter-discharge intervals (IDI). While the waveform of single EODs contains information about the sender’s identity, the variable IDI patterns convey information about its current motivational and behavioural state. Pairs of...
Model reduction is a central problem in mathematical biology. Reduced order models enable modeling of a biological system at different levels of complexity and the quantitative analysis of its properties, like sensitivity to parameter variations and resilience to exogenous perturbations. However, available model reduction methods often fail to capture a diverse range of nonlinear...
Skilled interception behavior often relies on accurate predictions of external objects because of a large delay in our sensorimotor systems. To deal with the sensorimotor delay, the brain predicts future states of the target based on the current state available, but it is still debated whether internal representations acquired from prior experience are used as well. Here we...
Maintaining balance is an essential skill regulated by the central nervous system (CNS) that helps humans to function effectively. Developing a physiologically motivated computational model of a neural controller with good performance is a central component for a large range of potential applications, such as the development of therapeutic and assistive devices, diagnosis of...
When learning a movement based on binary success information, one is more variable following failure than following success. Theoretically, the additional variability post-failure might reflect exploration of possibilities to obtain success. When average behavior is changing (as in learning), variability can be estimated from differences between subsequent movements. Can one...
Soon after hatching, the young of precocial species, such as domestic chicks or ducklings, learn to recognize their social partner by simply being exposed to it (imprinting process). Even artificial objects or stimuli displayed on monitor screens can effectively trigger filial imprinting, though learning is canalized by spontaneous preferences for animacy signals, such as certain...
How does your brain decide what you will do next? Over the past few decades compelling evidence has emerged that the basal ganglia, a collection of nuclei in the fore- and mid-brain of all vertebrates, are vital to action selection. Gurney, Prescott, and Redgrave published an influential computational account of this idea in Biological Cybernetics in 2001. Here we take a look...
We investigate the phenomenon of stochastic bursting in a noisy excitable unit with multiple weak delay feedbacks, by virtue of a directed tree lattice model. We find statistical properties of the appearing sequence of spikes and expressions for the power spectral density. This simple model is extended to a network of three units with delayed coupling of a star type. We find the...
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-021-00877-7 .
Octopus cells in the posteroventral cochlear nucleus exhibit characteristic onset responses to broad band transients but are little investigated in response to more complex sound stimuli. In this paper, we propose a phenomenological, but biophysically motivated, modeling approach that allows to simulate responses of large populations of octopus cells to arbitrary sound pressure...
Here while we reminisce about how partial directed coherence was proposed, its motivation and evolution, we take the opportunity to relate it to some of its kin quantities and some of its offspring. Emphasis is placed on our development of asymptotic criteria to place it as a reliable investigation tool, where the connectivity detection problem is completely solved as opposed to...
The widely cited Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model of motor coordination is used in an enormous range of applications. In this paper, we show analytically that the weakly damped, weakly coupled HKB model of two oscillators depends on only two dimensionless parameters; the ratio of the linear damping coefficient and the linear coupling coefficient and the ratio of the combined...