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

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