Dynamique de l’activité corticale et mécanismes de codage

Recently, the development of new experimental approaches allowing for simultaneous recording of many individual neurons in the living animal has lead to increasing interest in the dynamical coordination between the activities of cells in neural network. It is expected that the precise temporal organization of brain activity, such as the synchrony of discharge of hundreds or thousands of individual neurons, could be closely related to the coding and storing mechanisms used to represent information in the central nervous system. The work in our group participates to the study of this spatio-temporal organization of brain activity, and aims at a better understanding of the rules that governs encoding processes. Experimental approaches on behaving rats include multi-electrode recordings and, on anaesthetized rats, intra-cellular recordings and fast two-photon microscopy.