Two different perspectives have informed efforts to explain the link between the brain and
behaviour. One approach seeks to identify neural circuit elements that carry out specific …

A major shift is happening within neurophysiology: a population doctrine is drawing level
with the single-neuron doctrine that has long dominated the field. Population-level ideas …

A neuronal population encodes information most efficiently when its stimulus responses are
high-dimensional and uncorrelated, and most robustly when they are lower-dimensional …

The integration of data and scientific computation is driving a paradigm shift across the
engineering, natural, and physical sciences. Indeed, there exists an unprecedented …

Animals of the same species exhibit similar behaviours that are advantageously adapted to
their body and environment. These behaviours are shaped at the species level by selection …

The analysis of neural dynamics in several brain cortices has consistently uncovered low-
dimensional manifolds that capture a significant fraction of neural variability. These neural …

Highlights•New generations of recording and computing technologies have enabled
neuroscience at the level of the neural population.•Landmark scientific findings suggest the …

The curse of dimensionality plagues models of reinforcement learning and decision making.
The process of abstraction solves this by constructing variables describing features shared …

Neurons often respond to diverse combinations of task-relevant variables. This form of
mixed selectivity plays an important computational role which is related to the dimensionality …

Most sensory, cognitive and motor functions depend on the interactions of many neurons. In
recent years, there has been rapid development and increasing use of technologies for …