The missing half of the neurodynamical systems theory | The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

Bifurcations—an underexplored concept in neuroscience—can help explain how small differences in neural circuits give rise to entirely novel functions. Around the turn of this century, systems neuroscience began to shift its focus from single cells to neural populations. Gilles Laurent was among the first to simultaneously record from multiple single cells in a sensory neural circuit, data that required new analytical methods. In collaboration with a mathematician, he tied the circuit’s computation—the information processing of a stimulus—to the trajectories of neural population activity in a state space. At the same time, theorists began to think about the dynamics of neural activity in multidimensional terms. They proposed attractor network models—a neural circuit in which activity patterns settle into dynamical stable states—for sensory information processing, memory and decision-making. This pivot was the start of the dynamical systems approach to understanding how groups of neurons

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• Alexander Huang