Neural decoding

Neural decoding is a neuroscience field concerned with the hypothetical reconstruction of sensory and other stimuli from information that has already been encoded and represented in the brain by networks of neurons. Reconstruction refers to the ability of the researcher to predict what sensory stimuli the subject is receiving based purely on neuron action potentials. Therefore, the main goal of neural decoding is to characterize how the electrical activity of neurons elicit activity and responses in the brain. Neural decoding is a neuroscience field concerned with the hypothetical reconstruction of sensory and other stimuli from information that has already been encoded and represented in the brain by networks of neurons. Reconstruction refers to the ability of the researcher to predict what sensory stimuli the subject is receiving based purely on neuron action potentials. Therefore, the main goal of neural decoding is to characterize how the electrical activity of neurons elicit activity and responses in the brain. This article specifically refers to neural decoding as it pertains to the mammalian neocortex. When looking at a picture, people's brains are constantly making decisions about what object they are looking at, where they need to move their eyes next, and what they find to be the most salient aspects of the input stimulus. As these images hit the back of the retina, these stimuli are converted from varying wavelengths to a series of neural spikes called action potentials. These pattern of action potentials are different for different objects and different colors; we therefore say that the neurons are encoding objects and colors by varying their spike rates or temporal pattern. Now, if someone were to probe the brain by placing electrodes in the primary visual cortex, they may find what appears to be random electrical activity. These neurons are actually firing in response to the lower level features of visual input, possibly the edges of a picture frame. This highlights the crux of the neural decoding hypothesis: that it is possible to reconstruct a stimulus from the response of the ensemble of neurons that represent it. In other words, it is possible to look at spike train data and say that the person or animal being recorded is looking at a red ball. With the recent breakthrough in large-scale neural recording and decoding technologies, researchers have begun to crack the neural code and already provided the first glimpse into the real-time neural code of memory traces as memory is formed and recalled in the hippocampus, a brain region known to be central for memory formation. Neuroscientists have initiated large-scale brain activity mapping or brain decoding project to construct the brain-wide neural codes. Implicit about the decoding hypothesis is the assumption that neural spiking in the brain somehow represents stimuli in the external world. The decoding of neural data would be impossible if the neurons were firing randomly: nothing would be represented. This process of decoding neural data forms a loop with neural encoding. First, the organism must be able to perceive a set of stimuli in the world – say a picture of a hat. Seeing the stimuli must result in some internal learning: the encoding stage. After varying the range of stimuli that is presented to the observer, we expect the neurons to adapt to the statistical properties of the signals, encoding those that occur most frequently: the efficient-coding hypothesis. Now neural decoding is the process of taking these statistical consistencies, a statistical model of the world, and reproducing the stimuli. This may map to the process of thinking and acting, which in turn guide what stimuli we receive, and thus, completing the loop. In order to build a model of neural spike data, one must both understand how information is originally stored in the brain and how this information is used at a later point in time. This neural coding and decoding loop is a symbiotic relationship and the crux of the brain's learning algorithm. Furthermore, the processes that underlie neural decoding and encoding are very tightly coupled and may lead to varying levels of representative ability. Much of the neural decoding problem depends on the spatial resolution of the data being collected. The number of neurons needed to reconstruct the stimulus with reasonable accuracy depends on the means by which data is collected and the area being recorded. For example, rods and cones (which respond to colors of small visual areas) in the retina may require more recordings than simple cells (which respond to orientation of lines) in the primary visual cortex. Previous recording methods relied on stimulating single neurons over a repeated series of tests in order to generalize this neuron's behavior. New techniques such as high-density multi-electrode array recordings and multi-photon calcium imaging techniques now make it possible to record from upwards of a few hundred neurons. Even with better recording techniques, the focus of these recordings must be on an area of the brain that is both manageable and qualitatively understood. Many studies look at spike train data gathered from the ganglion cells in the retina, since this area has the benefits of being strictly feedforward, retinotopic, and amenable to current recording granularities. The duration, intensity, and location of the stimulus can be controlled to sample, for example, a particular subset of ganglion cells within a structure of the visual system. Other studies use spike trains to evaluate the discriminatory ability of non-visual senses such as rat facial whiskers and the olfactory coding of moth pheromone receptor neurons. Even with ever-improving recording techniques, one will always run into the limited sampling problem: given a limited number of recording trials, it is impossible to completely account for the error associated with noisy data obtained from stochastically functioning neurons (for example, a neuron's electric potential fluctuates around its resting potential due to a constant influx and efflux of sodium and potassium ions). Therefore, it is not possible to perfectly reconstruct a stimulus from spike data. Luckily, even with noisy data, the stimulus can still be reconstructed within acceptable error bounds.