Reproducing Infra-Slow Oscillations with Dopaminergic Modulation

In the human brain, billions of neurons construct a neural network via synaptic connections. Neuronal excitation and inhibition are transmitted to other neurons through synapses via neurotransmitters. Dopamine is one of these neurotransmitters that plays a number of important roles. There are a variety of rhythms in the brain, such as alpha rhythm, beta rhythm, and so on. Infra-slow oscillation, ISO, is one of the rhythms observed in the brain, and ranges below 0.1 Hz. One of the key roles of dopamine is the generation of ISO in neural networks. Although the mechanism underlying the generation of ISO remains unknown, ISO can be generated by activation of the D1-type dopamine receptor. The D1-type receptor regulates spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), which is a learning rule of the change in synaptic weights. In this paper, to reproduce ISO in neural networks, we show that dopaminergic modulation of STDP is essential. More specifically, we discovered a close relationship between two dopaminergic effects: modulation of the STDP function and generation of ISO. We therefore, numerically investigated the relationship in detail and proposed a possible mechanism by which ISO is generated.