Recent work in mathematical neuroscience has calculated the directed graph homology of the directed simplicial complex given by the brain's sparse adjacency graph, the so called connectome. These biological connectomes show an abundance of both high-dimensional directed simplices and Betti-numbers in all viable dimensions – in contrast to Erdős–Rényi-graphs of comparable size and density. An analysis of synthetically trained connectomes reveals similar findings, raising questions about the graphs comparability and the nature of origin of the simplices. We present a new method capable of delivering insight into the emergence of simplices and thus simplicial abundance. Our approach allows to easily distinguish simplex-rich connectomes of different origin. The method relies on the novel concept of an almost-d-simplex, that is, a simplex missing exactly one edge, and consequently the almost-d-simplex closing probability by dimension. We also describe a fast algorithm to identify almost-d-simplices in a given graph. Applying this method to biological and artificial data allows us to identify a mechanism responsible for simplex emergence, and suggests this mechanism is responsible for the simplex signature of the excitatory subnetwork of a statistical reconstruction of the mouse primary visual cortex. Our highly optimized code for this new method is publicly available.

Being permanently confronted with an uncertain world, brains have faced evolutionary pressure to represent this uncertainty in order to respond appropriately. Often, this requires visiting multiple interpretations of the available information or multiple solutions to an encountered problem. This gives rise to the so-called mixing problem: since all of these "valid" states represent powerful attractors, but between themselves can be very dissimilar, switching between such states can be difficult. We propose that cortical oscillations can be effectively used to overcome this challenge. By acting as an effective temperature, background spiking activity modulates exploration. Rhythmic changes induced by cortical oscillations can then be interpreted as a form of simulated tempering. We provide a rigorous mathematical discussion of this link and study some of its phenomenological implications in computer simulations. This identifies a new computational role of cortical oscillations and connects them to various phenomena in the brain, such as sampling-based probabilistic inference, memory replay, multisensory cue combination, and place cell flickering.

The dynamics and the sharp onset of action potential (AP) generation have recently been the subject of intense experimental and theoretical investigations. According to the resistive coupling theory, an electrotonic interplay between the site of AP initiation in the axon and the somato-dendritic load determines the AP waveform. This phenomenon not only alters the shape of APs recorded at the soma, but also determines the dynamics of excitability across a variety of time scales. Supporting this statement, here we generalize a previous numerical study and extend it to the quantification of the input-output gain of the neuronal dynamical response. We consider three classes of multicompartmental mathematical models, ranging from ball-and-stick simplified descriptions of neuronal excitability to 3D-reconstructed biophysical models of excitatory neurons of rodent and human cortical tissue. For each model, we demonstrate that increasing the distance between the axonal site of AP initiation and the soma markedly increases the bandwidth of neuronal response properties. We finally consider the Liquid State Machine paradigm, exploring the impact of altering the site of AP initiation at the level of a neuronal population, and demonstrate that an optimal distance exists to boost the computational performance of the network in a simple classification task.

Estimating the fundamental frequency (F0) of a signal is a well studied task in audio signal processing with many applications. If the F0 varies over time, the complexity increases, and it is also more difficult to provide ground truth data for evaluation. In this paper we present a novel dataset of cello recordings addressing the lack of reference annotations for musical instruments. Besides audio data, we include sensor recordings capturing the finger position on the fingerboard which is converted into an instantaneous frequency estimate. In speech processing, the electroglottograph (EGG) is able to capture the excitation signal of the vocal tract, which is then used to generate a reference instantaneous F0. Inspired by this approach, we included high speed video camera recordings to extract the excitation signal originating from the moving string. The derived data can be used to analyze vibratos --- a very commonly used playing style. The dataset is released under a Creative Commons license.