Dan Wilson

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  Control of Weakly (and Not So Weakly) Perturbed Neural Oscillatory
  Dan Wilson

  While high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a decades old treatment for alleviating the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, its mechanisms are not well understood. Some experimental evidence suggest that DBS works by making neurons fire more regularly, while other seemingly contradictory evidence suggests that DBS works by making neural firing patterns less synchronized. Here, we present theoretical and numerical results that suggest that these two mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. Specifically, in a noisy group of phase oscillators, high frequency perturbations can separate the population into multiple clusters, each with a nearly identical proportion of the overall population. Exploitation of this phenomenon could lead to better DBS protocols.