Scientists have long been interested in understanding how neurons in the brain coordinate their activity to drive motor, sensory, and cognitive processes. As such, a lot of research has gone into methods that can record the activity of these brain cells as they perform millisecond-scale computations.
These recording techniques favor one of two types of information: either capturing fewer neurons’ activity more precisely in time or more neurons with less timing precision. This trade-off has made it difficult to understand what exactly is happening in complex brain circuits.
But a recent study published in Nature Neuroscience in November 2022 by researchers in the lab of Matthew Kaufman, PhD at the University of Chicago, as well as scientists at Emory and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, could change this.