by Saeed Mahdisoltani 1, Saman Moghimi-Araghi 2
1Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 2Physics department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
It is known that various distribution functions of neuronal activities in, and connectivities between different parts of, the brain follow power-law forms, suggesting that it is a self-oragnized critical (SOC) system. Here we introduce a sandpile-type network with dynamical changes in the links modeled by Hebb’s rule and spike-timing-dependent-plasticity (STDP) mechanism, and we also allow new links to be created by the most active nodes and the weak links to be eliminated during a `pruning’ process. We show that these rules drive both the dynamics of the nodes and the structure of the network towards a scale-free steady state; the avalanche size distribution is given by a power-law with exponent 1.5, while the statistics of the links follows a scaling law with exponent 1, resembling the distribution of weights observed in the Human Connectome Project (HCP).
