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J Neurophysiol 100: 2165-2176, 2008. First published July 16, 2008; doi:10.1152/jn.01245.2007
0022-3077/08 $8.00

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Detecting Synfire Chain Activity Using Massively Parallel Spike Train Recording

¹Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany; ²Theoretical Neuroscience Group, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako City, Saitama, Japan; and ³Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Submitted 12 November 2007; accepted in final form 14 July 2008

The synfire chain model has been proposed as the substrate that underlies computational processes in the brain and has received extensive theoretical study. In this model cortical tissue is composed of a superposition of feedforward subnetworks (chains) each capable of transmitting packets of synchronized spikes with high reliability. Computations are then carried out by interactions of these chains. Experimental evidence for synfire chains has so far been limited to inference from detection of a few repeating spatiotemporal neuronal firing patterns in multiple single-unit recordings. Demonstration that such patterns actually come from synfire activity would require finding a meta organization among many detected patterns, as yet an untried approach. In contrast we present here a new method that directly visualizes the repetitive occurrence of synfire activity even in very large data sets of multiple single-unit recordings. We achieve reliability and sensitivity by appropriately averaging over neuron space (identities) and time. We test the method with data from a large-scale balanced recurrent network simulation containing 50 randomly activated synfire chains. The sensitivity is high enough to detect synfire chain activity in simultaneous single-unit recordings of 100 to 200 neurons from such data, enabling application to experimental data in the near future.