Beyond dimension reduction: Stable electric fields emerge from and allow representational drift.
作者信息
Pinotsis Dimitris A, Miller Earl K
机构信息
Centre for Mathematical Neuroscience and Psychology and Department of Psychology, City-University of London, London EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom; The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
出版信息
Neuroimage. 2022 Jun;253:119058. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119058. Epub 2022 Mar 8.
It is known that the exact neurons maintaining a given memory (the neural ensemble) change from trial to trial. This raises the question of how the brain achieves stability in the face of this representational drift. Here, we demonstrate that this stability emerges at the level of the electric fields that arise from neural activity. We show that electric fields carry information about working memory content. The electric fields, in turn, can act as "guard rails" that funnel higher dimensional variable neural activity along stable lower dimensional routes. We obtained the latent space associated with each memory. We then confirmed the stability of the electric field by mapping the latent space to different cortical patches (that comprise a neural ensemble) and reconstructing information flow between patches. Stable electric fields can allow latent states to be transferred between brain areas, in accord with modern engram theory.