Synchronization of the neural response to noisy periodic synaptic input in a balanced leaky integrate-and-fire neuron with reversal potentials

Neurons in which the level of excitation and inhibition are roughly balanced are shown to be very sensitive to the coherence of their synaptic input. The behavior of such balanced neurons with reversal potentials is analyzed both analytically and numerically using the leaky integrate-and-fire neural model. The investigation uses the Gaussian approximation with synaptic inputs modeled as inhomogeneous Poisson processes. The results indicate that for balanced neurons with N synaptic inputs, it is only necessary for O(/spl radic/N) of the synaptic inputs to have a periodicity in order that their spike outputs become phase-docked to this periodic signal.