What is your brain doing, while you prepare an arm movement?
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To answer this question, several labs have measured brain activity during diverse tasks, but it has been difficult to make sense of the observed activity patterns.
In a paper in NEURON, theoreticians from the Schools of Computer Science and Life Science at the EPFL (from the Gerstner's Lab), and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, now show that many of these features can be explained by a model of interacting neurons where the activity of excitatory neurons is stabilized through smartly tuned inhibition. Most of the work reported in the paper was performed as part of the PhD thesis of Guillaume Hennequin here at EPF, undertaken in the frame of the PhD Program in Neuroscience.