Neural mass models have been used since the 1970s to model the coarse-grained activity of large populations of neurons. They have proven especially fruitful for understanding brain rhythms. However, although motivated by neurobiological considerations they are phenomenological in nature, and cannot hope to recreate some of the rich repertoire of responses seen in real neuronal tissue. Here we consider a simple spiking neuron network model that has recently been shown to admit an exact mean-field description for both synaptic and gap-junction interactions. The mean-field model takes a similar form to a standard neural mass model, with an additional dynamical equation to describe the evolution of within-population synchrony. As well as reviewing the origins of this next generation mass model we discuss its extension to describe an idealised spatially extended planar cortex. To emphasise the usefulness of this model for EEG/MEG modelling we show how it can be used to uncover the role of local gap-junction coupling in shaping large scale synaptic waves.

自 1970 年代以来，神经质量模型一直用于模拟大量神经元的粗粒度活动。事实证明，它们对于理解大脑节律特别有效。然而，尽管出于神经生物学的考虑，它们本质上是现象学的，并且不能希望重现在真实神经元组织中看到的一些丰富的反应库。在这里，我们考虑一个简单的尖峰神经元网络模型，该模型最近被证明可以对突触和间隙连接相互作用进行精确的平均场描述。平均场模型采用与标准神经质量模型类似的形式，具有一个额外的动力学方程来描述种群内同步的演变。以及回顾下一代的起源我们讨论了质量模型以描述理想化的空间扩展平面皮层的扩展。为了强调该模型对 EEG/MEG 建模的有用性，我们展示了如何使用它来揭示局部间隙连接耦合在塑造大规模突触波中的作用。