Noise-activated barrier crossing in multi-attractor spiking networks

Noise-activated transitions between coexisting attractors are investigated in a chaotic spiking network. At low noise level, attractor hopping consists of discrete bifurcation events that conserve the memory of initial conditions. When the escape probability becomes comparable to the intra-basin hopping probability, the lifetime of attractors is given by a detailed balance where the less coherent attractors act as a sink for the more coherent ones. In this regime, the escape probability follows an activation law allowing us to assign pseudo-activation energies to limit cycle attractors. These pseudo-energies introduce a useful metric for evaluating the resilience of biological rhythms to perturbations.