Neural mechanism for encoding rhythmic information:a review / 中国药理学与毒理学杂志

ABSTRACT

Extracting and encoding rhythmic information is very important for brain functions, as it is the foundation of speech recognition,music appreciation and rhythmic movement et al.However,our knowledge of how the neural system processes rhythm information of external inputs remains limited. In the present paper,we review a neural network model of the scale-free topology can serve as an efficient way to encode rhythm information. In the model, neurons are connected by either electrical synapses or chemical synapses with strengths decreasing with the connectivity of neurons, so that hub neurons are difficult to activate. To encode rhythm information, hub neurons trigger synchronous firing across the network, while loops formed by low-degree neurons determine the rhythm of synchronous firing. This model successfully reproduces the long-period synchronous firing observed in experimental data, and indicates that the neural system can encode temporal information via local dynamics in a distributed way.This review aims to elaborate and summarize the mechanism by which neurons encode rhythmic information.