What if… spontaneous neural activity 🧠 reflects the baseline rumblings of a brainwide dynamical system initialized for learning? We find that the rumblings have macroscopic properties like those emerging from linear symmetric, critical systems 🧵 #neuroscience #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Awesome work by @mrbadash.bsky.social and the crew at @ucscgenomics.bsky.social
Goal-directed learning in cortical #organoids
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our manuscript preprint is out!

Our work demonstrates that the emergence of intrinsic computational architectures, defined by low- and high-dimensional activity patterns and neuronal sequences, is an emergent property of neuronal self-assembly and achievable in brain organoid models.

Phenomena such as "preplay," pre-existing sequence motifs are thought to encode novel experiences and underlie episodic memory retrieval in the human cortex. These motifs have recently been shown to encode non-redundant information beyond latency and rate encoding.

The use of neuronal sequences to encode sensory input and motor output has been widely studied. However, whether these sequences arise innately through neurogenesis and synaptogenesis (nature) or emerge through sequential experience (nurture) remains unresolved.

This conclusion can be made most powerfully in a brain organoid that does not have the intimate developmental interaction with other organ systems and thus excludes an internal setting due to cardiac signals, for example, of brain rhythms.

Employing human and murine brain organoids alongside ex vivo neonatal murine brain slices, we demonstrate that intrinsic neuronal sequences, which delineate low- and high-dimensional latent subspaces for information encoding, emerge independently of sensory experience.

In our updated manuscript we present strong evidence supporting the pre-configured brain hypothesis. Separating the effects of experience from intrinsic network dynamics has historically been challenging due to experimental limitations.

I’m thrilled to share our revised work on neuronal sequences in brain #organoids. It has been an absolute joy to collaborate with an incredible team of talented experimental and computational neuroscientists brought together by this project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...