State Space Dynamics Quotes

“At the heart of the decoding problem is how to understand the vast information contained in neural signals, the challenge of what is being called "big data". For neuroscientists, big data is a means for exploring populations of neurons to discover the macroscopic signatures of dynamical systems, rather than attempting to make sense of the activity of individual neurons. Two surprising results from numerous experiments recording from neurons in different brain regions have revealed a wonderful secret of nature about the relation between the number of neurons recorded and and their dimensionality (the number of principal components required to explain a fixed percentage of variance). First, the dimensionality of the neural data is much smaller than the number of recorded neurons. Second, when dimensionality procedures are used to extract neuronal state dynamics, the resulting low-dimensional neural trajectories reveal portraits of the behavior of a dynamical system. This means that it may not be necessary to record from many more neurons within a brain region in order to accurately recover its internal state-space dynamics.”
― Eugene C. Goldfield, Bioinspired Devices: Emulating Nature’s Assembly and Repair Process