Related papers: The time is ripe to reverse engineer an entire ner…
A quantitative understanding of how sensory signals are transformed into motor outputs places useful constraints on brain function and helps reveal the brain's underlying computations. We investigate how the nematode C. elegans responds to…
Biological circuits such as neural or gene regulation networks use internal states to map sensory input to an adaptive repertoire of behavior. Characterizing this mapping is a major challenge for systems biology, and though experiments that…
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…
C. elegans locomotion is composed of switches between forward and reversal states punctuated by turns. This locomotory capability is necessary for the nematode to move towards attractive stimuli, escape noxious chemicals, and explore its…
Neuromechanics aims to understand the link between an animal's neural activity and its physical behaviors. Recent advances in experimental and machine learning techniques enable simultaneous recordings of neural and locomotion dynamics over…
Given the inner complexity of the human nervous system, insight into the dynamics of brain activity can be gained from understanding smaller and simpler organisms, such as the nematode C. Elegans. The behavioural and structural biology of…
One of the central aims of neuroscience is to reliably predict the behavioral response of an organism using its neural activity. If possible, this implies we can causally manipulate the neural response and design brain-computer-interface…
The emerging field of optogenetics allows for optical activation or inhibition of neurons and other tissue in the nervous system. In 2005 optogenetic proteins were expressed in the nematode C. elegans for the first time. Since then, C.…
Our understanding of neural computation is founded on the assumption that neurons fire in response to a linear summation of inputs. Yet experiments demonstrate that some neurons are capable of complex functions that require interactions…
Cortical neurons include many sub-cellular processes, operating at multiple timescales, which may affect their response to stimulation through non-linear and stochastic interaction with ion channels and ionic concentrations. Since new…
Animals must integrate sensory cues with their current behavioral context to generate a suitable response. How this integration occurs is poorly understood. Previously we developed high throughput methods to probe neural activity in…
The human brain receives complex inputs when performing cognitive tasks, which range from external inputs via the senses to internal inputs from other brain regions. However, the explicit inputs to the brain during a cognitive task remain…
We develop a biophysically realistic model of the nematode C. elegans that includes: (i) its muscle structure and activation, (ii) key connectomic activation circuitry, and (iii) a weighted and time-dynamic proprioception. In combination,…
In neuroscience, researchers have developed informal notions of what it means to reverse engineer a system, e.g., being able to model or simulate a system in some sense. A recent influential paper of Jonas and Kording, that examines a…
Individual Neurons in the nervous systems exploit various dynamics. To capture these dynamics for single neurons, we tune the parameters of an electrophysiological model of nerve cells, to fit experimental data obtained by calcium imaging.…
The neural dynamics of the nematode C. elegans are experimentally low-dimensional and correspond to discrete behavioral states, where previous modeling work has found neural proxies for some of these states. Experimental results further…
Recent whole-brain calcium imaging recordings of the nematode C. elegans have demonstrated that neural activity is dominated by dynamics on a low-dimensional manifold that can be clustered according to behavioral states. Despite progress in…
Control is essential to the functioning of any neural system. Indeed, under healthy conditions the brain must be able to continuously maintain a tight functional control between the system's inputs and outputs. One may therefore hypothesise…
To learn how cognition is implemented in the brain, we must build computational models that can perform cognitive tasks, and test such models with brain and behavioral experiments. Cognitive science has developed computational models of…
Accurate and robust recording and decoding from the central nervous system (CNS) is essential for advances in human-machine interfacing. However, technologies used to directly measure CNS activity are limited by their resolution,…