NeuroNex Theory Team: Inferring interactions between neurons, stimuli, and behavior

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Scientists have learned much about how the activity of individual neurons relates to sensations, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. However, all neurons live and function within the enormous web that is the brain. Scientists are still far from understanding how the complex, dynamic dance between the cells that form this web makes us who we are. While new technologies allow scientists to observe the activity of massive numbers of neurons in living brains, they still cannot make sense of such data. The goal of this NeuroNex Theory team is to develop a new lens - a set of mathematical and computational tools - for making sense of the dynamic brain activity data. These techniques will allow them to deduce when and how observed neurons interact, how these interactions are altered by stimuli, and how they may govern behavior. The resulting combination of revolutionary experimental and mathematical tools will provide neuroscientists with unprecedented insights into the brain's distributed neural computations.This NeuroNex Theory team will develop statistical tools that will provide insights into the computations performed by neuronal ensembles, by relating what the animal observes to recorded neural activity as well as how the neural activity relates to behavior. They will validate the methods using simulated neuronal networks, and apply them to recordings from the mouse brain. The team will also develop and test their approach using modern deep neural networks (convolutional nets and recurrent architectures) that achieve or exceed human performance in many hard tasks. This will allow them to quantify how interactions in these artificial networks change with the stimulus, and compare and contrast the results with data from animals. This is a broad set of goals that requires a combination of approaches and diverse expertise. The team therefore consists of experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, mathematicians, and statisticians who will work together closely. The true test of this work will be the impact it will have on brain science in general. The team is therefore committed to sharing their techniques, code and data. They have also assembled a group of End Users to be early adopters and testers of these methods. This NeuroNex Theory Team award is funded as part of the BRAIN Initiative and NSF's Understanding the Brain activities.