Transition from local to global phase synchrony in small world neural network and its possible implications for epilepsy

Temporal correlations in the brain are thought to have very dichotomous roles. On one hand they are ubiquitously present in the healthy brain and are thought to underlie feature binding during information processing. On the other hand, large-scale synchronization is an underlying mechanism of epileptic seizures. In this paper we show a potential mechanism for the transition to pathological coherence underlying seizure generation. We show that properties of phase synchronization in a two-dimensional lattice of nonidentical coupled Hindmarsh-Rose neurons change radically depending on the connectivity structure of the network. We modify the connectivity using the small world network paradigm and measure properties of phase synchronization using a previously developed measure based on assessment of the distributions of relative interspike intervals. We show that the temporal ordering undergoes a dramatic change as a function of topology of the network from local coherence strongly dependent on the distance between two neurons, to global coherence exhibiting a larger degree of ordering and spanning the whole network.