White Matter Networks

Project description

Demyelination has long been associated with diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and more recently with psychiatric disorders including depression and schizophrenia (where structural differences in white matter networks are manifest). It has only relatively recently been established that myelin is also modifiable by experience and can affect information processing by regulating the velocity of signal transmission to produce synchronous arrival of synaptic inputs between distant (and multiple) cortical regions. Indeed, myelin plasticity is increasingly being seen as a complementary partner to synaptic plasticity and, as well as being important to nervous system development, it has a major role to play in complex information processing tasks that involve coupling and synchrony among different brain regions.

This project will build a new mathematical framework for biologically motivated neural networks to help understand the important contribution that activity-dependent regulation of myelination can make to patterns of rhythmic activity known to subserve important aspects of large-scale brain dynamics and its dysfunction. It will

i) combine perspectives from neural mass and network modelling and develop a new set of mathematical tools able to unravel the contributions of space-dependent axonal delays to large-scale spatio-temporal patterning of brain activity;

ii) develop new mathematical models for myelin based plasticity and analyse their consequences for network timing.