Local neural wiring may set the brain's range of activity patterns
The human brain contains billions of neurons, specialized nerve cells that receive, transmit and process information through electrical and chemical signals. Human thoughts, sensory perceptions and behaviors are known to emerge not from the activity of individual neurons but from collective patterns of activity distributed across different neuron populations.
Neurons in the human brain communicate via electrical and chemical signals, giving rise to thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors through collective patterns of activity. Researchers measured the dimensionality, or number of independent activity patterns, of neural activity in the mouse visual cortex. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, indicate that local neural wiring plays a significant role in shaping the range of activity patterns the brain can explore.
Using Neuropixels probes, the researchers analyzed high-density recordings to identify how synaptic motifs in recurrent networks control the dimensionality of neural activity across different brain areas. They discovered that these synaptic motifs, which are prevalent in both mouse and human brains, influence the number of distinct activity patterns that neurons can exhibit simultaneously.
This suggests that local circuitry in the cortex systematically controls the brain's degrees of freedom. The researchers also observed that cortical activity transitions among states with varying dimensionalities over time. Their work sheds light on the biological factors that control neural activity and could inform studies of brain disorders and the development of brain-inspired computational models.
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