Realistic coupling enables flexible macroscopic traveling waves in the mouse cortex

Traveling waves are ubiquitous in neuronal systems across different spatial scales. While microscopic and mesoscopic waves are relatively well studied, the mechanisms underlying the emergence of macroscopic traveling waves remain less understood. Here, by modeling the mouse cortex using spatial transcriptomic and connectivity data, we show that realistic cortical connectivity can generate a significantly higher level of macroscopic traveling waves than local and uniform connectivity. By quantifying the traveling waves in the 3-D domain, we discovered that the level of macroscopic traveling waves depends not only on the network connectivity but also non-monotonically depends on the coupling strength between neurons in the network. We also found that slow oscillations (0.5 - 4 Hz) are more likely to form large-scale, macroscopic traveling waves than other faster oscillations in the network with realistic connectivity. Together, our work shows how flexible macroscopic traveling waves can emerge in the mouse cortex and offers a computational framework to further study traveling waves in the mouse brain at the single-cell level.