“…Cortical spontaneous activity may be a signature of neural circuitry (Tsodyks and Sejnowski, 1995; van Vreeswijk and Sompolinsky, 1996; Brunel, 2000), is modulated by attentional state (Steriade et al, 2001; Rudolph et al, 2005; Poulet and Petersen, 2008; Goard and Dan, 2009; Constantinople and Bruno, 2011; Nichols et al, 2011), and influences stimulus encoding (Kisley and Gerstein, 1999; Anderson et al, 2000; Petersen et al, 2003; Sachdev et al, 2004; Hasenstaub et al, 2007; Ringach, 2009; Destexhe, 2011; Mulders and Robertson, 2011) and synaptic plasticity (Mazzoni et al, 1991; Rokni et al, 2007; Legenstein et al, 2010; Humble et al, 2011; Hinton et al, 2012). A key parameter in models of cortical circuitry underlying such activity is the balance of synaptic excitation and inhibition (Kumar et al, 2008; Murphy and Miller, 2009; Sanchez-Vives et al, 2010; Vogels et al, 2011).…”