Dynamic Range in the C.elegans Brain Network

TL;DR

This study investigates how external electrical stimulations propagate through the neural network of C. elegans, revealing that the network's response depends on the initially perturbed community and is linked to criticality and information flow capacity.

Contribution

It introduces a community-based perturbation approach to analyze neural response propagation and relates it to the network's criticality and information flow in C. elegans.

Findings

Perturbations propagate selectively depending on the community.

Some perturbations do not trigger any response.

Responses are linked to low neural synchronization and high information flow.

Abstract

We study external, electrical perturbations and their responses in the brain dynamic network of the \textit{Caenorhabditis elegans} soil worm, given by the connectome of its large somatic nervous system. Our analysis is inspired by a realistic experiment where one stimulates externally specific parts of the brain and studies the persistent neural activity triggered in other cortical regions. In this work, we perturb groups of neurons that form communities, identified by the walktrap community detection method, by trains of stereotypical electrical Poissonian impulses and study the propagation of neural activity to other communities by measuring the corresponding dynamic ranges and Steven law exponents. We show that when one perturbs specific communities, keeping the rest unperturbed, the external stimulations are able to propagate to some of them but not to all. There are also perturbations that do not trigger any response. We found that this depends on the initially perturbed community. Finally, we relate our findings for the former cases with low neural synchronization, self-criticality and large information flow capacity, and interpret them as the ability of the brain network to respond to external perturbations when it works at criticality and its information flow capacity becomes maximal.