Department of Neuroscience, The Chicago Medical School, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, Illinois, United States.
Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, The Chicago Medical School, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, Illinois, United States.
Elife. 2017 Aug 7;6:e27342. doi: 10.7554/eLife.27342.
The joint activity of neural populations is high dimensional and complex. One strategy for reaching a tractable understanding of circuit function is to seek the simplest dynamical system that can account for the population activity. By imaging 's pedal ganglion during fictive locomotion, here we show that its population-wide activity arises from a low-dimensional spiral attractor. Evoking locomotion moved the population into a low-dimensional, periodic, decaying orbit - a spiral - in which it behaved as a true attractor, converging to the same orbit when evoked, and returning to that orbit after transient perturbation. We found the same attractor in every preparation, and could predict motor output directly from its orbit, yet individual neurons' participation changed across consecutive locomotion bouts. From these results, we propose that only the low-dimensional dynamics for movement control, and not the high-dimensional population activity, are consistent within and between nervous systems.
神经元群体的共同活动具有多维性和复杂性。一种用于理解电路功能的可行策略是寻求能够解释群体活动的最简单的动力系统。通过对虚拟运动过程中的“踏板神经节”进行成像，我们发现其整体活动源自一个低维螺旋吸引子。诱发运动使群体进入一个低维、周期性、衰减的轨道——一个螺旋，在这个螺旋中，它表现出一个真正的吸引子，在被诱发时收敛到相同的轨道，并在短暂的扰动后回到该轨道。我们在每个准备阶段都发现了相同的吸引子，并且可以直接从其轨道预测运动输出，而单个神经元的参与在连续的运动回合中发生变化。根据这些结果，我们提出只有运动控制的低维动力学，而不是高维群体活动，在神经系统内部和之间是一致的。
