Neural continuum networks are an important aspect of the modeling of macroscopic parts of the cortex. Two classes of such networks are considered: voltage and activity based. In both cases, our networks contain an arbitrary number, n , of interacting neuron populations. Spatial nonsymmetric connectivity functions represent cortico-cortical, local connections, and external inputs represent nonlocal connections. Sigmoidal nonlinearities model the relationship between (average) membrane potential and activity. Departing from most of the previous work in this area, we do not assume the nonlinearity to be singular, that is, represented by the discontinuous Heaviside function. Another important difference from previous work is that we relax the assumption that the domain of definition where we study these networks is infinite, that is, equal to or . We explicitly consider the biologically more relevant case of a bounded subset Ω of , a better model of a piece of cortex. The time behavior of these networks is described by systems of integro-differential equations. Using methods of functional analysis, we study the existence and uniqueness of a stationary (i.e., time-independent) solution of these equations in the case of a stationary input. These solutions can be seen as ‘persistent’; they are also sometimes called bumps . We show that under very mild assumptions on the connectivity functions and because we do not use the Heaviside function for the nonlinearities, such solutions always exist. We also give sufficient conditions on the connectivity functions for the solution to be absolutely stable, that is, independent of the initial state of the network. We then study the sensitivity of the solutions to variations of such parameters as the connectivity functions, the sigmoids, the external inputs, and, last but not least, the shape of the domain of existence Ω of the neural continuum networks. These theoretical results are illustrated and corroborated by a large number of numerical experiments in most of the cases 2 ⩽ n ⩽ 3, 2 ⩽ q ⩽ 3.

We present a mathematical model of a neural mass developed by a number of people, including Lopes da Silva and Jansen. This model features three interacting populations of cortical neurons and is described by a six-dimensional nonlinear dynamical system. We address some aspects of its behavior through a bifurcation analysis with respect to the input parameter of the system. This leads to a compact description of the oscillatory behaviors observed in Jansen and Rit (1995) (alpha activity) and Wendling, Bellanger, Bartolomei, and Chauvel (2000) (spike-like epileptic activity). In the case of small or slow variation of the input, the model can even be described as a binary unit. Again using the bifurcation framework, we discuss the influence of other parameters of the system on the behavior of the neural mass model.