Topic: attempted handwriting

The activity of neural populations can be well-described by relatively few population-wide activity patterns spanning a “neural manifold”. Virtually all these studies have analysed flat neural manifolds to understand how the brain controls behaviour. We hypothesised that since neurons have nonlinear responses and make thousands of recurrent connections that may enhance this nonlinearity, nonlinear manifolds should capture the neural population activity better than flat manifolds. Analysis of a centre-out reaching task in monkeys confirmed that, even during a relatively simple behaviour, moto