The organisation of experience: Neural persistence from neuronal ensembles to EEG microstates

Experience unfolds continuously, with current states constrained by prior activity and changing context. Domenico Guarino tests whether this continuity appears as reproducible neural trajectories rather than isolated events. Neuronal population events form persistent trajectories whose transitions depend on prior states and other brain areas. In human EEG, microstate sequences exhibit dependencies beyond dwell time and first-order Markov predictions, and stimuli systematically reshape those dependencies. Linking ensemble and EEG dynamics may reveal classes of individual responses and inform general AI models predicting responses to stimuli.