  We investigate the regularity of spontaneous spiking activity on Newman-Watts
small-world networks consisting of biophysically realistic Hodgkin-Huxley
neurons with a tunable intensity of intrinsic noise and fraction of blocked
voltage-gated sodium and potassium ion channels embedded in neuronal membranes.
We show that there exists an optimal fraction of shortcut links between
physically distant neurons, as well as an optimal intensity of intrinsic noise,
which warrant an optimally ordered spontaneous spiking activity. This doubly
coherence resonance-like phenomenon depends significantly, and can be
controlled via the fraction of closed sodium and potassium ion channels,
whereby the impacts can be understood via the analysis of the firing rate
function as well as the deterministic system dynamics. Potential biological
implications of our findings for information propagation across neural networks
are also discussed.
