Spatiotemporal coding in an electrochemical oscillatory network

A network consisting of N relaxation electrochemical oscillators, mutually coupled by all-to-all inhibitory connections, can have (N-1) ! coexisting out-of-phase states, each state being a permutation of a periodic spiking sequence. The modification of the out-of-phase states by shots of laser pulse perturbations is shown. In such networks the phase relation of the oscillators is stored as a coded pattern. The ability of the network to function as a rewritable memory of (N-1) ! different spatiotemporal patterns is demonstrated experimentally for N=4.