Complex dynamics for a reduced model of human EEG: implications for the physiological basis of brain activity

Liley's mesoscopic mean-field theory of mammalian cortex electro-rhythmogenesis describes the salient features of dynamical activity within a cortical macrocolumn based on the bulk interactions between inhibitory and excitatory neuronal populations. Recently, a method for cataloguing the possible qualitative dynamical features of this model and other nonlinear systems of interest to neuroscience has been proposed, with the aim of establishing stronger connections between the dynamical patterns observed in neural field models and their neurobiological foundations. In this poster, a state space reduction of Liley's model is briefly described with the behaviour of a number of different parametric instantiations illustrated to show that many of the important features of the original equations are preserved. The persistence of a richly complex dynamical landscape for this reduced model is apparent. For a range of physiologically meaningful values of parameters, it is found that local interactions between neuronal populations are sufficient to produce biologically compelling activity even in the absence of long-range cortico-cortical connections or spatial anisotropies. These patterns are either entirely novel or reproduce some of the known features of the full fourteen dimensional set of nonlinear equations in Liley's model.