  Slow-wave sleep in mammalians is characterized by a change of large-scale
cortical activity currently paraphrased as cortical Up/Down states. A recent
experiment demonstrated a bistable collective behaviour in ferret slices, with
the remarkable property that the Up states can be switched on and off with
pulses, or excitations, of same polarity; whereby the effect of the second
pulse significantly depends on the time interval between the pulses. Here we
present a simple time discrete model of a neural network that exhibits this
type of behaviour, as well as quantitatively reproduces the time-dependence
found in the experiments.
