Isolated spikes and bursts of spikes are thought to provide the two major modes of information coding by neurons. Bursts are known to be crucial for fundamental processes between neuron pairs, such as neuronal communications and synaptic plasticity. Neuronal bursting also has implications in neurodegenerative diseases and mental disorders. Despite these findings on the roles of bursts, whether and how bursts have an advantage over isolated spikes in the network-level computation remains elusive. Here, we demonstrate in a computational model that not isolated spikes, but intrinsic bursts can greatly facilitate learning of Lévy flight random walk trajectories by synchronizing burst onsets across a neural population. Lévy flight is a hallmark of optimal search strategies and appears in cognitive behaviors such as saccadic eye movements and memory retrieval. Our results suggest that bursting is crucial for sequence learning by recurrent neural networks when sequences comprise long-tailed distributed discrete jumps.

Isolated spikes and bursts of spikes are thought to provide the two major modes of information coding by neurons. Bursts are known to be crucial for fundamental processes between neuron pairs, such as neuronal communications and synaptic plasticity. Deficits in neuronal bursting can also impair higher cognitive functions and cause mental disorders. Despite these findings on the roles of bursts, whether and how bursts have an advantage over isolated spikes in the network-level computation remains elusive. Here, we demonstrate in a computational model that not isolated spikes but intrinsic bursts can greatly facilitate learning of Lévy flight random walk trajectories by synchronizing burst onsets across neural population. Lévy flight is a hallmark of optimal search strategies and appears in cognitive behaviors such as saccadic eye movements and memory retrieval. Our results suggest that bursting is a crucial component of sequence learning by recurrent neural networks in the brain.