Neural activity in quarks language: Lattice Field Theory for a network of real neurons
Brain-computer interfaces surged extraordinary developments in recent years, and a significant discrepancy now exists between the abundance of available data and the limited headway made in achieving a unified theoretical framework. This discrepancy becomes particularly pronounced when examining the collective neural activity at the micro- and meso-scale, where a coherent formalization that adequately describes neural interactions is still lacking. Here, we introduce a mathematical framework to analyze systems of natural neurons and interpret the related empirical observations in terms of lattice field theory, an established paradigm from theoretical particle physics and statistical mechanics. Our methods are tailored to interpret data from chronic neural interfaces, especially spike rasters from measurements of single neurons activity, and generalize the maximum entropy model for neural networks so that also the time evolution of the system is taken into account. This is obtained by bridging particle physics and neuroscience, paving the way to particle physics-inspired models of neocortex.
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