The population firing rate in the presence of GABAergic tonic inhibition in single neurons and application to general anaesthesia

Tonic inhibition has been found experimentally in single neurons and affects the activity of neural populations. This kind of inhibition is supposed to set the background or resting level of neural activity and plays a role in the brains arousal system, e.g. during general anaesthesia. The work shows how to involve tonic inhibition in population rate-coding models by deriving a novel transfer function. The analytical and numerical study of the novel transfer function reveals the impact of tonic inhibition on the population firing rate. Finally, a first application to a recent neural field model for general anaesthesia discusses the origin of the loss of consciousness during anaesthesia.