Topic: latent dimensions

Understanding how neuronal populations interact to process information and generate behaviour is a central goal of neuroscience. This can be challenging due to the high dimensionality of the neuronal populations, the dense interactions between them and the unobserved factors that influence the dynamics. The neuronal manifold hypothesis tackles high dimensionality by positing that the relevant dynamics occurs on a lower-dimensional manifold. While the neuronal manifold may be useful in visualising global dynamics, it tells us very little about how various subsystems interact to produce these dy

Psychedelics (5-HT2AR agonists) show great promise in treating mental disorders but their effects on neuronal population activity are not clear. Latent dimensions identified by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) capture the dynamics of this interrelated neuronal population activity. We asked whether latent dimensions emerge or disappear as a result of psychedelic administration (acute), and across other naturally occurring brain state transitions (sleep, arousal). Contrastive PCA (cPCA) [Abid et al. (2018), Nature Comm.] was applied to spontaneous brain activity recordings in rodents before