Broken chaotic clocks of brain neurons and depression

TL;DR

This paper analyzes neural firing patterns in rats, revealing that healthy neurons exhibit periodic and chaotic clocks, while depressive neurons show broken clocks leading to decoherence, which may relate to consciousness narrowing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of analyzing neuron spike trains via telegraph signals and links broken neural clocks to depression and consciousness phenomena.

Findings

Healthy neurons show periodic and chaotic firing patterns.

Depressive neurons exhibit broken neural clocks and decoherence.

Large-scale chaotic coherence observed during transition to consciousness.

Abstract

Irregular spiking time-series obtained in vitro and in vivo from singular brain neurons of different types of rats are analyzed by mapping to telegraph signals. Since the neural information is coded in the length of the interspike intervals and their positions on the time axis, this mapping is the most direct way to map a spike train into a signal which allows a proper application of the Fourier transform methods. This analysis shows that healthy neurons firing has periodic and chaotic deterministic clocks while for the rats representing genetic animal model of human depression these neuron clocks might be broken, that results in decoherence between the depressive neurons firing. Since depression is usually accompanied by a narrowing of consciousness this specific decoherence can be considered as a cause of the phenomenon of the consciousness narrowing as well. This suggestion is also supported by observation of the large-scale chaotic coherence of the posterior piriform and entorhinal cortices' electrical activity at transition from anesthesia to the waking state with full consciousness.