Tutorial 1f: Recording spikesΒΆ

In the previous part of the tutorial, we defined a network with not entirely trivial behaviour, and printed the number of spikes. In this part, we’ll record every spike that the network generates and display a raster plot of them. We start as before:

from brian import *

tau = 20 * msecond        # membrane time constant
Vt = -50 * mvolt          # spike threshold
Vr = -60 * mvolt          # reset value
El = -49 * mvolt          # resting potential (same as the reset)
psp = 0.5 * mvolt         # postsynaptic potential size

G = NeuronGroup(N=40, model='dV/dt = -(V-El)/tau : volt',
              threshold=Vt, reset=Vr)

C = Connection(G, G)
C.connect_random(sparseness=0.1, weight=psp)

M = SpikeMonitor(G)

G.V = Vr + rand(40) * (Vt - Vr)

run(1 * second)

print M.nspikes

Having run the network, we simply use the raster_plot() function provided by Brian. After creating plots, we have to use the show() function to display them. This function is from the PyLab module that Brian uses for its built in plotting routines.

raster_plot()
show()
_images/1f.jpg

As you can see, despite having introduced some randomness into our network, the output is very regular indeed. In the next part we introduce one more way to plot the output of a network.