Related papers: Order-forcing in Neural Codes
Neural codes allow the brain to represent, process, and store information about the world. Combinatorial codes, comprised of binary patterns of neural activity, encode information via the collective behavior of populations of neurons. A…
Neural codes serve as a language for neurons in the brain. Convex codes, which arise from the pattern of intersections of convex sets in Euclidean space, are of particular relevance to neuroscience. Not every code is convex, however, and…
Neural codes are lists of subsets of neurons that fire together. Of particular interest are neurons called place cells, which fire when an animal is in specific, usually convex regions in space. A fundamental question, therefore, is to…
Neural codes, represented as collections of binary strings called codewords, are used to encode neural activity. A code is called convex if its codewords are represented as an arrangement of convex open sets in Euclidean space. Previous…
A convex code is a binary code generated by the pattern of intersections of a collection of open convex sets in some Euclidean space. Convex codes are relevant to neuroscience as they arise from the activity of neurons that have convex…
Neural codes, represented as collections of binary strings, encode neural activity and show relationships among stimuli. Certain neurons, called place cells, have been shown experimentally to fire in convex regions in space. A natural…
Neural codes are collections of binary strings motivated by patterns of neural activity. In this paper, we study algorithmic and enumerative aspects of convex neural codes in dimension 1 (i.e. on a line or a circle). We use the theory of…
This dissertation explores applications of discrete geometry in mathematical neuroscience. We begin with convex neural codes, which model the activity of hippocampal place cells and other neurons with convex receptive fields. In Chapter 4,…
Every ordered collection of sets in Euclidean space can be associated to a combinatorial code, which records the regions cut out by the sets in space. Given two ordered collections of sets, one can form a third collection in which the…
A combinatorial neural code is a subset of the power set $2^{[n]}$ on $[n]=\{1,\dots, n\}$, in which each $1\leq i\leq n$ represents a neuron and each element (codeword) represents the co-firing event of some neurons. Consider a space…
Previous work on convexity of neural codes has produced codes that are open-convex but not closed-convex -- or vice-versa. However, why a code is one but not the other, and how to detect such discrepancies are open questions. We tackle…
Given an intersection pattern of arbitrary sets in Euclidean space, is there an arrangement of convex open sets in Euclidean space that exhibits the same intersections? This question is combinatorial and topological in nature, but is…
Place cells are neurons that act as biological position sensors, associated with and firing in response to regions of an environment to situate an organism in space. These associations are recorded in (combinatorial) neural codes,…
The brain encodes spacial structure through a combinatorial code of neural activity. Experiments suggest such codes correspond to convex areas of the subject's environment. We present an intrinsic condition that implies a neural code may…
How does the brain encode spatial structure? One way is through hippocampal neurons called place cells, which become associated to convex regions of space known as their receptive fields: each place cell fires at a high rate precisely when…
Convex neural codes are combinatorial structures describing the intersection pattern of a collection of convex sets. Inductively pierced codes are a particularly nice subclass of neural codes introduced in the information visualization…
We introduce new geometric and combinatorial criteria that preclude a neural code from being convex, and use them to tackle the classification problem for codes on six neurons. Along the way, we give the first example of a code that is…
We define a notion of morphism between combinatorial codes, making the class of all combinatorial codes into a category $\mathbf{Code}$. We show that morphisms can be used to remove redundant information from a code, and that morphisms…
A combinatorial code $\mathcal{C}$ is a collection of subsets of $[n]$, or equivalently a set of points in $\{0,1\}^n$. A morphism of codes is a map from one combinatorial code to another such that the coordinates of points in the image can…
Neural codes are binary codes in $\{0,1\}^n$; here we focus on the ones which represent the firing patterns of a type of neurons called place cells. There is much interest in determining which neural codes can be realized by a collection of…