Identifying critical brain-wide information flows through neuronal cell assemblies

A well-established hypothesis in neuroscience proposes that the fundamental unit of brain computation consists of synchronized groups of neurons, known as cell assemblies. Our team demonstrated the existence of reader neurons, responsive to the activity of cell assemblies from upstream brain structures, and showed that functional links between assemblies and their readers are modified through learning processes. On the other hand, there is accumulating evidence that brain-wide dynamics are characterized by neuronal avalanches, namely aperiodic bursts of activity spreading across the population in coordinated events characterized by scale-invariant size and duration, a property which hints at the possibility that the brain self-organizes around a critical point. Our goal is thus to extract basic rules of neural information processing by exploring the interplay between cell assemblies, neuronal avalanches, and brain-wide communication. This will provide foundational insights into the elusive issue of how information propagates across brain networks, shedding light on a domain that remains largely unexplored in our current understanding of neural dynamics.