CAM colloquium - April 2 (Joint with IGERT Program in Nonlinear Systems)

David Terman
Ohio State

"A Model for Neuronal Activity in the Basal Ganglia"

The basal ganglia are a group of nuclei that play an important role in the generation of movement. Dysfunction of the basal ganglia is associated with movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease and Huntington's chorea. Structures within the basal ganglia have in fact been the target of recent therapeutic surgical procedures including pallidotomy and deep brain stimulation. Numerous experiments have demonstrated that neurons within the basal ganglia display a variety of dynamic behaviors; moreover, patterns of neuronal activity differ between normal and pathological states. Neither the origins of these neural firing patterns nor the mechanisms that underlie the patterns are understood. In this lecture I will review a recent model for neurons within the subthalamic nucleus and external segment of the globus pallidus; these structures form the so-called indirect pathway of the basal ganglia. I will describe various firing patterns that can emerge in the model and discuss geometric dynamical systems methods for analyzing the activity patterns.