Mathematical Biology Seminar Juan Restrepo, University of Colorado Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018 3:05pm in LCB 225 Multilayer network regulation of critical neuronal dynamics Abstract: It has been hypothesized that the cortex operates in a regime where the overall strength of excitatory and inhibitory synapses is balanced, and that this balance has functional advantages for information processing. In this talk, I will first describe how experiments testing this hypothesis have been guided and reproduced by relatively simple models of stochastic binary neurons. Then I will discuss how the balance between excitatory and inhibitory signals can be maintained in the presence of destabilizing factors like synaptic plasticity. In particular, we propose a mechanism that regulates the activity of the neural network by the transport of metabolic resources through a secondary network of glial cells. For a large range of parameter models, the interaction between the two networks spontaneously results in balanced excitation and inhibition. In this regime the neural network produces power-law distributed avalanches of activity as observed in experiments. Furthermore, the glial network protects the system against the potentially destabilizing effect of heterogeneities in parameters. A simplified model can be analyzed in terms of a 3-dimensional map, giving insight into the robustness of these results to the choice of model parameters.