The Neural Mechanism Of Arousal And Its Computational Simulation

Consciousness has been concerned for many years. Recently, along with the development of neuroscience, consciousness became a focus in science. Human beings can be under many kinds of consciousness states, such as arousal, sleep-spindle sleep, slow oscillation sleep and seizure. Under these different states, the level of our awareness is also different. In this article, based on the physiology of our brain and the Hodgkin-Huxley model, we build a model to simulate the activity of thalamocortical system. On a certain extent, this model can exhibit the EEG in different levels of consciousness.First, by adjusting several parameters, we can simulate the EEG of arousal, sleep-spindle sleep, slow oscillation and partial seizure. On the level of ion channel, we analyze the neural mechanism of different states, especially the generation, maintenance and termination of sleep-spindle oscillation. Furthermore, the C0 complexity is introduced into this studying. The result indicates that, on one hand, with the same afferent and under different consciousness states, the complexity of the model decreases with the losing of consciousness; on the other hand, with different afferent, the complexity becomes different and remains the same when under the states of consciousness and unconsciousness, respectively.From the study, we can get this conclusion: The thalamocortical system is able to process the afferent stimulus under the consciousness state; meanwhile, the activity of the brain is related to the information carried by the afferent stimulus. Under the unconsciousness state, the thalamocortical system can block the afferent stimulus by spontaneous activity; in the meantime, the activity of the brain is almost independent of the afferent stimulus.