Topic: neural spiking

Highly-social animals, like humans, live with many individuals, and interact with each other at times, locations and manner of their choosing. However, neurophysiological investigations of social responses are rarely conducted in such rich settings. To determine how the brain represents social information in a naturalistic setting – when the animals’ behavior is not experimentally constrained to a particular task – we constructed a bat cave for a colony of 5–10 bats of both sexes. The bats lived there 24×7, free to engage in any behaviors. Every day we conducted a ~3 hour experimental session,

Understanding neural information processing is extremely challenging. This is because often, it is not even clear what information neurons are really processing. However, we can access the dynamic fingerprint of the processing with information-theoretic and statistical methods. Recent work has thus focused on the autocorrelation time of neural activity, also termed intrinsic timescale, which serves as a proxy for how long information is stored in the activity of the network. This work revealed a hierarchy of intrinsic timescales, which suggests that along the processing hierarchy, the brain

Numerous computational models of the cochlea have been developed that faithfully capture the transformation of incoming sound into basilar membrane motion and auditory nerve spike patterns, with widespread uptake across academia and industry. Models of sensory processing in the brain, however, are generally much less accurate, with even the best failing to explain most of the variance in sub-cortical and cortical neural activity.Here, we used large-scale neural recordings from measurement sites spanning the inferior colliculus (IC) of normal-hearing gerbils to develop a deep learning model of