Removing Type II–II synapses desynchronized intraburst activity. Peak height was high, indicating strong synchronization at initiation (B), burst width increased greatly and became highly variable (C), burst shape was heavily sloped, reflecting long, slowly terminating tails of activity (D), and termination order was not affected (E). (A–E) Raster plots (A, top panel), network firing rates (A, bottom panel) and bursting metrics (B–E, boxplots as in Fig. 2) for an excitatory heterogeneous network with 25% of synapses removed (A) or with 5% of synapses successively removed (B–E); all removed synapses were Type II–II.