Bifurcations of Neural Fields on the Sphere

Abstract: A common model to study pattern formation in large groups of neurons is the neural field. We investigate a neural field with excitatory and inhibitory neurons, like Wilson and Cowan (1972), with transmission delays and gap junctions. We build on the work of Visser et al. (2017) by investigating pattern formation in these models on the sphere. Specifically, we investigate how different amounts of gap-junctions, modelled by a diffusion term, influence the behaviour of the neural field. We look in detail at the periodic orbits which are generated by Hopf bifurcation in the presence of spherical symmetry. For this end, we derive general formulas to compute the normal form coefficients of these bifurcations up to third order and predict the stability of the resulting branches, and formulate a novel numerical method to solve delay equations on the sphere.