Related papers: Statistical Neuroscience in the Single Trial Limit
Humans and animals exhibit a range of interesting behaviors in dynamic environments, and it is unclear how our brains actively reformat this dense sensory information to enable these behaviors. Experimental neuroscience is undergoing a…
Biological networks exhibit complex, coordinated patterns of activity. Can these patterns be captured precisely in simple models? Here we use measurements of simultaneous activity in 1000+ neurons in the mouse brain to test the validity of…
Neurophysiologists are nowadays able to record from a large number of extracellular electrodes and to extract, from the raw data, the sequences of action potentials or spikes generated by many neurons. Unfortunately these ''many neurons''…
Perceptions and actions, thoughts and memories result from coordinated activity in hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain. It is an old dream of the physics community to provide a statistical mechanics description for these and…
The experimental study of neural networks requires simultaneous measurements of a massive number of neurons, while monitoring properties of the connectivity, synaptic strengths and delays. Current technological barriers make such a mission…
We demonstrate that the information contained in the spike occurrence times of a population of neurons can be broken up into a series of terms, each of which reflect something about potential coding mechanisms. This is possible in the…
We recently reported the existence of fluctuations in neural signals that may permit neurons to code multiple simultaneous stimuli sequentially across time. This required deploying a novel statistical approach to permit investigation of…
Neural activity fluctuates over a wide range of timescales within and across brain areas. Experimental observations suggest that diverse neural timescales reflect information in dynamic environments. However, how timescales are defined and…
Simultaneous behavioral and electrophysiological recordings call for new methods to reveal the interactions between neural activity and behavior. A milestone would be an interpretable model of the co-variability of spiking activity and…
The brain modifies its synaptic strengths during learning in order to better adapt to its environment. However, the underlying plasticity rules that govern learning are unknown. Many proposals have been suggested, including Hebbian…
As experiments advance to record from tens of thousands of neurons, statistical physics provides a framework for understanding how collective activity emerges from networks of fine-scale correlations. While modeling these populations is…
In this work we explore encoding strategies learned by statistical models of sensory coding in noisy spiking networks. Early stages of sensory communication in neural systems can be viewed as encoding channels in the information-theoretic…
What fascinates us about animal behavior is its richness and complexity, but understanding behavior and its neural basis requires a simpler description. Traditionally, simplification has been imposed by training animals to engage in a…
Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…
Neural noise sets a limit to information transmission in sensory systems. In several areas, the spiking response (to a repeated stimulus) has shown a higher degree of regularity than predicted by a Poisson process. However, a simple model…
Neuronal dynamics is intrinsically unstable, producing activity fluctuations that are essentially scale-free. Here we show that while these scale-free fluctuations are independent of temporal input statistics, they can be entrained by input…
Plasticity is one of the most important properties of the nervous system, which enables animals to adjust their behavior to the ever-changing external environment. Changes in synaptic efficacy between neurons constitute one of the major…
The brain is immensely complex, with diverse components and dynamic interactions building upon one another to orchestrate a wide range of functions and behaviors. Understanding patterns of these complex interactions and how they are…
Over repeat presentations of the same stimulus, sensory neurons show variable responses. This "noise" is typically correlated between pairs of cells, and a question with rich history in neuroscience is how these noise correlations impact…
Statistical mechanics determines the abundance of different arrangements of matter depending on cost-benefit balances. Its formalism and phenomenology percolate throughout biological processes and set limits to effective computation. Under…