Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 228, 2465-2474 (2019)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2019-800203-3

Regular Article

Synchronization patterns in a blinking multilayer neuronal network

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), 424 Hafez Ave., Tehran 15875-4413 Iran
² School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan 411201, P.R. China
³ Neuroscience Research Center, Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

^a e-mail: sajadjafari83@gmail.com

Received: 16 November 2018
Received in final form: 14 December 2018
Published online: 28 October 2019

Abstract

Synchronization is one of the most prominent collective behaviors in neuroscience which can be associated with information processing and many pathological patterns of the brain. Since multilayer networks have crucial roles in better understanding the real complex systems, in this paper, we study a two-layer neuronal network of Hindmarsh–Rose neurons. Moreover, the network is considered to have blinking structure which can refer to the duration of spikes arrivals and also the synaptic plasticity. The blinking network is composed of the non-locally coupled neurons and time-variant on–off couplings between any other pair of neurons. Particularly, we investigate the synchronization patterns emerging in the network by varying coupling strength and wiring probability, in different values of external current. Variation of the coupling parameters can cause the emergence of various dynamical states such as chimera state, imperfect synchronization and change of synchronous spikes to synchronous bursts or vice versa. It can also lead to synchronization transition between FHC and FH bursting types.