Benoit Scholtes: The population dynamics of the motor cortex
| When |
Nov 30, 2021
from 05:15 PM to 05:45 PM |
|---|---|
| Where | Bernstein Center, Hansastr. 9a, Lecture Hall, Ground Floor |
| Contact Name | Fiona Siegfried |
| Contact Phone | 0761 203 9549 |
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The Seminar will NOT be held in the lecture theatre, but will instead take place online using Zoom.
Abstract
The recent ability to simultaneously measure the activity of hundreds of neurons have led to many interesting discoveries concerning the motor cortex. Firstly, the firing-rate, population dynamics of the motor cortex shows traces of a dynamical system, namely rotational dynamics. Importantly, these dynamics reside on low-dimensional manifolds rather than exploring the full neural activity space, presumably due to the neural network structure.
The use of brain–computer interfaces has furthermore shown that animals can learn to produce new activity patterns inside the manifold much more easily than outside the manifold. Lastly, dynamics related to movement preparation and movement execution occur in orthogonal subspaces in the manifold, allowing for parallel computations. In this talk, I will discuss these discoveries and the unanswered questions relating to how the motor cortex plans and produces movement