Paper detail

Can intrinsic noise induce various resonant peaks?

We theoretically describe how weak signals may be efficiently transmitted throughout more than one frequency range in noisy excitable media by kind of stochastic multiresonance. This serves us here to reinterpret recent experiments in neuroscience, and to suggest that many other systems in nature might be able to exhibit several resonances. In fact, the observed behavior happens in our (network) model as a result of competition between (1) changes in the transmitted signals as if the units were varying their activation threshold, and (2) adaptive noise realized in the model as rapid activity-dependent fluctuations of the connection intensities. These two conditions are indeed known to characterize heterogeneously networked systems of excitable units, e.g., sets of neurons and synapses in the brain. Our results may find application also in the design of detector devices.