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Reading and writing the neural code

Nature Neuroscience volume 16, pages 259–263 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

It has been more than 20 years since Bialek and colleagues published a landmark paper asking a seemingly innocuous question: what can we extract about the outside world from the spiking activity of sensory neurons? Can we read the neural code? Although this seemingly simple question has helped us shed light on the neural code, we still do not understand the anatomical and neurophysiological constraints that enable these codes to propagate across synapses and form the basis for computations that we need to interact with our environment. The sensitivity of neuronal activity to the timing of synaptic inputs naturally suggests that synchrony determines the form of the neural code, and, in turn, regulation of synchrony is a critical element in 'writing' the neural code through the artificial control of microcircuits to activate downstream structures. In this way, reading and writing the neural code are inextricably linked.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank D.A. Butts, J.-M. Alonso, C. Schwarz and D.C. Millard for comments on the manuscript. G.B.S. was supported by US National Science Foundation Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience grants IIS-0904630 and IOS-1131948, and US National Institutes of Health National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grant 2R01NS048285.

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  1. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology & Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Garrett B Stanley

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Correspondence to Garrett B Stanley.

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Stanley, G. Reading and writing the neural code. Nat Neurosci 16, 259–263 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3330

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