Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NINI (Neuronal Information through Neuronal Interactions)
Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31
Our thoughts and actions result from the activity of functionally specialized neurons in the brain. We have learned a lot about how individual neurons encode information about our environment, thoughts and actions. But we lack understanding of how this information comes about. How does this information results from the dense local interactions among neurons within brain regions as well as from the large-scale interactions across different brain regions? Answering this question is not only key to understanding the neural underpinnings of our thoughts and actions but also provides the basis for a mechanistic understanding of disturbances of neural information processing in the diseased brain. The key objective of this project is to address this question and to directly investigate which neuronal interactions establish information coding.
We employed an interdisciplinary approach that tightly integrates human and animal electrophysiology. This approach combines non-invasive measurements of neuronal population activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and encephalography (EEG) with intra-cortical recordings of the activity of individual neurons. On the one hand, this approach allowed us to characterize various types of neural information from low level sensory, to cognitive and motor information at the population and cellular level. On the other hand, this allowed us to identify and characterize neuronal interactions within and between brain regions. Furthermore, based on this approach we identified several relations between different types of local and large-scale neuronal interactions and the encoding of neural information. Together, our results suggest that specific local and large-scale neuronal interactions play a fundamental role for the encoding of neural information in local and large-scale brain networks.
We developed several novel experimental and analytical approaches, based on which we expect to identify and characterize specific local and large-scale neuronal interactions that underlie neuronal information coding.