Stochastic resonance in globally coupled nonlinear oscillators

System size stochastic resonance: General nonequilibrium potential framework

“…The study of SR in extended or coupled systems, motivated by both, some experimental results and the growing technological interest, has recently attracted considerable attention [ 4,5,6,7,8,9,12]. In previous papers [6,7,8,9,12] we have studied the SR phenomenon for the transition between two different patterns, exploiting the concept of nonequilibrium potential [13,14,15].…”

“…These were, together with the possible technological applications, the main motivation to many recent studies showing the possibility of achieving an enhancement of the system response by means of the coupling of several units in what conforms an extended medium [4,5,6,7,8,9], or analyzing the possibility of making the system response less dependent on a fine tuning of the noise intensity, as well as different ways to control the phenomenon [10,11].…”

Aspects of stochastic resonance in reaction–diffusion systems: The nonequilibrium-potential approach

“…The possibility of enhancing the system's response through the coupling of those units [6,7,8,9,10,11,12] has been among the issues explored during the last decade, together with the "naturalness" problem (how does nature manage to make the system's response less dependent on a fine tuning of the noise intensity) or that of searching for different ways to control the phenomenon [13,14].…”

Towards Simplicity: Noise and Cooperation in the Perfect Integrator

“…Such Inter-Spike-Interval Histograms (ISIHs) are ubiquitous in the neurophysiological literature and, as we shall see below, can be simply and elegantly explained by simple models of neurons as bistable dynamic switching devices subject to noise. The results have lead a few bold individuals to speculate on the possible beneficial role of noise (in particular, cooperative stochastic processes such as described in the preceeding paragraph) in the processing of sensory neural information [7][8][9][10][11][44][45][46][47][48]. Other researchers have speculated [40,61,62] that the experimentally observable background noise may be a natural phenomenon rather than a laboratory curiosity.…”

“…11,12) consisted of modelling the sensory neuron as a noisy bistable (describable by a dynamics predicated on a "soft" potential) switching element. Such a model has been derived [8][9][10] from a fully coupled model of a cell body interacting (at the axon hillock), via a weak nonlinear coupling, with a dendritic "bath", the dendrites being represented as quasi-linear elements which, in general, would also be capable of "firing". Of course, the idea of bistability in this context is not new; it dates back to the seminal work of Landahl, McCullough and Pitts [41] -3 -who considered the neuron as a discrete (i.e.…”