Heterogeneous network coupling induced ‘local sleep’ in brain cognitive networks

It was evidenced that in the sleep deprived brain, subsets of neurons may enter an off period while others remain on, called local sleep (Nature 472, 443 (2011)), but the underlying mechanism is still not completely understood. To figure out the answer, herein we present a neural network model of individual cognitive networks with adaptive chemical coupling and find that with the increase of coupling strength, a phenomenon of coexistence of activated and inactivated clusters can be observed, which thus provides a possible explanation for the mechanism of local sleep. This phenomenon is closely related to the feature of degree heterogeneity of cognitive networks and will disappear in homogeneous networks. Further, we show that the activated cluster comes from recurrent oscillation death while the inactivated cluster comes from their stabilized synchronization. Finally, a brief theoretical analysis is provided to explain these results.