An excitable electronic circuit as a sensory neuron model

MEDEIROS BRUNO; MINCES VICTOR; COPELLI MAURO; MINDLIN GABRIEL; RIOS LEITE , JOSE

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BIFURCATION AND CHAOS

WORLD SCIENTIFIC PUBL CO PTE LTD

Lugar: London, UK; Año: 2012 vol. 22 p. 1 - 9

0218-1274

An electronic circuit device, inspired on the FitzHugh?Nagumo model of neuronal excitability,was constructed and shown to operate with characteristics compatible with those of biologicalsensory neurons. The nonlinear dynamical model of the electronics quantitatively reproduces theexperimental observations on the circuit, including the Hopf bifurcation at the onset of tonicspiking. Moreover, we have implemented an analog noise generator as a source to study thevariability of the spike trains. When the circuit is in the excitable regime, coherence resonance isobserved. At sufficiently low noise intensity the spike trains have Poisson statistics, as in manybiological neurons. The transfer function of the stochastic spike trains has a dynamic range of6 dB, close to experimental values for real olfactory receptor neurons.