#9 Hugo Merchant: Neuronal population clocks

I just visited the ESI SyNC 2024 conference on the topic of "Time in the brain". There, I interviewed Hugo Merchant, an electrophysiologist at UNAM in Juriquilla, Mexico. Hugo works with macaques, who can rhythmically tap their fingers synchronized to a visual or auditory beat. By studying macaque neural activity in dimensionality-reduced spaces, he wants to understand how the brain encodes different time intervals. For an overview of our conversation, see the timestamps below.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:02:57) - Monkeys rhythmic finger tapping

(00:08:27) - Timing network in pre-motor cortex and basal ganglia

(00:12:43) - Circular neural trajectories

(00:16:08) - Mapping latent space to single-cell physiology

(00:20:15) - Experimentally slowing the clock

(00:23:19) - Spatial organization of circuits

(00:27:59) - Error correction & single-trial analyses

(00:38:57) - Bayesian & SNN models

• Hugo's Website
• Hugo's publications & talks:
  • Betancourt et al., 2023 - Amodal population clock in the primate medial premotor system for rhythmic tapping paper
  • Pérez et al., 2023 - Rhythmic tapping to a moving beat: motion kinematics overrules motion naturalness - preprint (Bayesian model)
  • ESI SyNC 2024 Talk (should be uploaded within a month here)
• Other papers/books mentioned:
  • Shine, 2021 - The thalamus integrates the macrosystems of the brain to facilitate complex, adaptive brain network dynamics paper
  • Zemlianova et al., 2024 - A Recurrent Neural Network for Rhythmic Timing preprint (SNN model)

For Apple Podcast users, find books/papers links at: https://akseliilmanen.wixsite.com/home/post/pod09

• My Twitter @akseli_ilmanen
• Email: akseli.ilmanen[at]gmail.com
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• Music: Space News, License: Z62T4V3QWL