Introduction:
Analysis of the dynamical mechanisms underlying spatially structured activity states in neural tissue is crucially important for understanding a wide range of neurobiological phenomena, both naturally occurring and pathological. For example, neurological disorders such as epilepsy and migraine are characterized by waves propagating across the surface of the brain. Spatially coherent activity states are also prevalent during the normal healthy functioning of the brain, encoding local properties of visual and auditory stimuli, encoding head direction and spatial location, and maintaining persistent activity states in short-term working memory. In this minisymposium the existence and stability of coherent activity states in non-local (integro-differential) neural models and their subsequent spreading will be analyzed, and the dependence on various biologically relevant parameters determined. |