Common inputs have been suggested as a means for biological oscillators to synchronize even when they are uncoupled. Recent neurophysiological
experiments have verifued this in brain oscillations. In this talk, I
discuss mechanisms for how this synchrony is achieved and address several questions. (1) What is the relationship between output and input
correlation? (2) What aspects of the temporal signal are optimal for
synchrony? (3) What does the optimal stimulus tell us about the intrinsic dynamics of the biological system? By using concepts from dynamical systems and recent work in stochastic dynamics, we are able to answer these questions for a broad class of models.
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