BMI Seminar // Marcel Oberlaender - Deciphering the cortical output code – A multiscale approach to predictive brain modelling

Speaker: Marcel Oberlaender, Dept. of Integrative Neurophysiology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands Organiser: BMI  Host: Carl Petersen <p>To orchestrate complex behaviors in mammals, the cerebral cortex must continuously transmit its processing results to subcortical regions. While internal cortical processing relies on highly selective sparse codes, these descending cortical output streams employ an enigmatic dense code, characterized by high firing rates and low feature selectivity. This dense population code presents a profound paradox: how can downstream regions extract precise, cognitively relevant signals when most cortical output neurons can be active at any moment? We address this paradox by testing the hypothesis tha