Topic: distributed brain states

Sensory neuron responses vary across repeated presentations of the same stimuli, but whether this trial-to-trial variability represents noise versus unidentified signals remains unresolved (1–3). Some of the variability can be attributed to correlations of neural activity with locomotion, arousal, and other overt movements (4–7). We hypothesized that distributed brain states, i.e., patterns of neural activity observable in other brain regions, may account for more of the unexplained trial-to-trial variability in responses of sensory cortical neurons. To test this, we used Neuropixels 2.0 probe