Spontaneous traveling waves naturally emerge from horizontal fiber time delays and travel through locally asynchronous-irregular states

Studies of sensory-evoked neuronal responses often focus on mean spike rates, with fluctuations treated as internally-generated noise. However, fluctuations of spontaneous activity, often organized as traveling waves, shape stimulus-evoked responses and perceptual sensitivity. The mechanisms underlying these waves are unknown. Further, it is unclear whether waves are consistent with the low rate and weakly correlated “asynchronous-irregular” dynamics observed in cortical recordings. Here, we describe a large-scale computational model with topographically-organized connectivity and conduction delays relevant to biological scales. We find that spontaneous traveling waves are a general property of these networks. The traveling waves that occur in the model are sparse, with only a small fraction of neurons participating in any individual wave. Consequently, they do not induce measurable spike correlations and remain consistent with locally asynchronous irregular states. Further, by modulating local network state, they can shape responses to incoming inputs as observed in vivo.