Understanding the high-dimensional chaotic dynamics occurring in complex biological systems such as recurrent neural networks or ecosystems remains a conceptual challenge. For low-dimensional dynamics...

Computation in recurrent networks of neurons has been hypothesized to occur at the level of low-dimensional latent dynamics, both in artificial systems and in the brain. This hypothesis seems at odds ...

A major challenge in neuroscience is reconciling idealized theoretical models with complex, heterogeneous experimental data. We address this challenge through the lens of continuous-attractor networks...

A long-standing debate in neuroscience concerns whether individual neurons are organized into functionally distinct populations that encode information differently ("categorical" representations) and the implications for neural computation. Here, we systematically analyzed how cortical neurons encode cognitive, sensory, and movement variables across 43 cortical regions during a complex task (14,000+ units from the International Brain Laboratory public Brainwide Map data set) and studied how these properties change across the sensory-cognitive cortical hierarchy. We found that the structure of the neural code was scale-dependent: on a whole-cortex scale, neural selectivity was categorical and organized across regions in a way that reflected their anatomical connectivity. However, within individual regions, categorical representations were rare and limited to primary sensory areas. Remarkably, the degree of categorical clustering of neural selectivity was inversely correlated to the dime