Emergence of chaotic resonance controlled by extremely weak feedback signals in neural systems

IntroductionChaotic resonance is similar to stochastic resonance, which emerges from chaos as an internal dynamical fluctuation. In chaotic resonance, chaos-chaos intermittency (CCI), in which the chaotic orbits shift between the separated attractor regions, synchronizes with a weak input signal. Chaotic resonance exhibits higher sensitivity than stochastic resonance. However, engineering applications are difficult because adjusting the internal system parameters, especially of biological systems, to induce chaotic resonance from the outside environment is challenging. Moreover, several studies reported abnormal neural activity caused by CCI. Recently, our study proposed that the double-Gaussian-filtered reduced region of orbit (RRO) method (abbreviated as DG-RRO), using external feedback signals to generate chaotic resonance, could control CCI with a lower perturbation strength than the conventional RRO method.MethodThis study applied the DG-RRO method to a model which includes excitatory and inhibitory neuron populations in the frontal cortex as typical neural systems with CCI behavior.Results and discussionOur results reveal that DG-RRO can be applied to neural systems with extremely low perturbation but still maintain robust effectiveness compared to conventional RRO, even in noisy environments.