Asynchronous and slow-wave oscillatory states in connectome-based models of mouse, monkey and human cerebral cortex

Abstract

Thanks to the availability of connectome data that map connectivity between multiple brain areas, it is now possible to build models of whole brain activity. At the same time, advances in mean-field techniques have led to biologically based population models that integrate biophysical features such as membrane conductances or synaptic conductances. In this paper, we show that this approach can lead to brain-wide models of mouse, macaque, and human. We illustrate this approach by showing the transition from wakefulness to sleep simulated with multi-scale models in the three species. We compare the level of synchrony between the three species and found that the mouse brain displays a higher overall synchrony of slow-waves compared to monkey and human brains. We show that these differences are due to the different delays of axonal signal propagation between regions associated to brain-size differences between the species. We also make the program code publicly available, which provides a set of open-source tools for simulating large-scale activity in the cerebral cortex of mouse, monkey, and human.