Brainwide organization of neuronal activity

This project will reveal how neural activity is structured in brainwide patterns to support diverse behaviors, using powerful techniques that record and interpret the activity of a myriad individual neurons.

The brain is a high-dimensional system, but coarse measurements of macroscopic brain activity - from EEG, fMRI, LFP, and widefield imaging - reveal a surprisingly simple low-dimensional structure.

By recording from large neuronal populations across the mouse brain we will determine: 1) how macroscopic activity patterns are organized across brain structures at the level of individual neurons and neuronal cell classes; (2) how they interact with the high-dimensional activity patterns that encode sensory signals, and modulate the transmission of signals across brain regions; (3) how they depend on the performance of different behaviors, and evolve over time as animals learn a task.

The results will provide a new understanding of how neural activity is organized across a myriad individual neurons into the brainwide patterns that shape behavior.