A Formal Classification of Bursting Mechanisms in Excitable Systems

Burst activity is characterized by slowly alternating phases of near steady state behavior and trains of rapid spike-like oscillations; examples of bursting patterns are shown in Fig. 2. These two phases have been called the silent and active phases respectively [2], In the case of electrical activity of biological membrane systems the slow time scale of bursting is on the order of tens of seconds while the spikes have millisecond time scales. In our study of several specific models for burst activity we have identified a number of different mechanisms for burst generation (which are characteristic of classes of models). We will describe qualitatively some of these mechanisms by way of the schematic diagrams in Fig. 1.