Brainwide organization of neuronal activity

The brain’s electrical chatter, when recorded at coarse scales like fMRI or EEG, looks deceptively simple—but this project will zoom in to see how that simplicity emerges from the activity of millions of individual neurons across the mouse brain. Why this matters: Neuroscientists have long known that brain-wide activity patterns (like those seen in scans) are low-dimensional, while the activity of single neurons is staggeringly high-dimensional. No one understands how these two scales connect. This project will map that relationship: how macroscopic patterns arise from specific cell classes, how they interact with sensory signals, and how they change as animals learn. Potential impact: This is fundamental science. It will not produce a new drug or device. But understanding how the brain organises activity across scales could eventually reshape how we interpret human brain scans—turning fuzzy fMRI blobs into something closer to a mechanistic readout of neural computation. Past fundamental work on neural coding laid the groundwork for brain-computer interfaces; this project could do the same for understanding how distributed brain activity supports flexible behaviour.