Our new paper on collective neural control is published

Posted June 2022 by Bryan Daniels

New technology can manipulate the brain activity of small worms, potentially allowing for control of behavior through the nudging of neurons. But it is difficult to predict which nudges will work best: Even in the simple brain of a worm, many individual neurons do not have a single well-defined role.

In a project spearheaded by Eddie Lee, with help from our collaborator Xiaowen Chen, we envision new types of experiments that could efficiently find the best sets of neurons to manipulate for any desired effect. We explore the ways in which neural activity and its control over behavior can remain low-dimensional — our findings suggest that only a few aspects of neural activity matter for controlling what a worm does, and these changes can be made by nudging only a small number of neurons.

Check out the details in Plos Computational Biology: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010072