Periodic neural activity induced by network complexity

Abstract

We study a model for neural activity on the small-world topology of Watts and Strogatz and on the scale-free topology of Barabási and Albert. We find that the topology of the network connections may spontaneously induce periodic neural activity, contrasting with nonperiodic neural activities exhibited by regular topologies. Periodic activity exists only for relatively small networks and occurs with higher probability when the rewiring probability is larger. The average length of the periods increases with the square root of the network size.