Effects of periodic stimulation on an overly activated neuronal circuit

Motivated by therapeutic deep brain stimulation, we carried out a model study on the effects of periodic stimulation on an overly activated neuronal circuit. Our neuronal circuit, modeled as a small-world network of noisy Hodgkin-Huxley neurons, is controlled to undergo the mechanism of coherence resonance to exhibit spontaneous synchronization of neuronal firing. This state of energy burst is then directly modulated by a chain of electric pulses. Our study shows that (i) the stimulation blocks the synchronization by generating traveling waves, (ii) only the pulse with proper frequency can block the synchronization, and (iii) the effects of stimulation are completely reversible. It is also found that the stimulation is effective only when the network maintains fairly good structural regularity.