Carsen Stringer

Maybe, we thought, the brain uses some kind of averaging over its millions of noisy neurons to get a clean estimate of what it’s looking at.pic.twitter.com/jzTSA9kyK0

Can we find these “magical” combinations by looking at the brain while it’s looking at our images? We used a microscope to record the activity of ~20,000 neurons simultaneously. Here is all of them from one session in random colors.pic.twitter.com/iaNkGRUZCD

We used linear regression to find weights for each neuron that combine their activities into “super-neurons”.pic.twitter.com/Rxepy0oB69

These super-neurons were much less noisy than single neurons. In fact, the super-neurons could tell the difference between 45 and 46 degrees on 95% of the test trials. Can you?pic.twitter.com/wuueSaanHH

Imagine asking a mouse to distinguish such small differences... Our colleagues in @BenucciLab actually tried! The mouse could only tell apart angle differences of 29 degrees, which was about 100 times worse than the neurons.pic.twitter.com/MeXXVeiWma

Even for humans it’s difficult, but I bet you can see the difference if I make the pictures into a movie.pic.twitter.com/S7nfZEpGbP

We conclude that mice have a lot of information in their brains, which are 1000x smaller than ours.pic.twitter.com/xVxz0TW5cB