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Neural manifolds: more than the sum of their neurons

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 26, page 312 (2025)Cite this article

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Together with lesion and stimulation studies, correlating the recorded activity of single neurons from behaving animals with relevant task variables allowed neuroscientists to draw the ‘maps’ of brain function found in textbooks. However, early in the 21st century, some researchers — inspired by the study of coordinated behaviour in complex systems — quietly initiated what became a small paradigm shift in systems neuroscience: moving the focus from single-neuron activity to the coordinated activity across neurons in a recorded population.

Probably inspired by this result’s beauty, groups started to adopt this manifold approach to interpret the activity of the increasing neuron numbers they were recording — work that led to several fascinating findings that unfortunately cannot be covered here. But Sadtler et al. took this approach one step further by asking whether neural manifolds are more than a convenient way to interpret the population activity: what if they capture something fundamental about neural function?

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  1. Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Juan Alvaro Gallego

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  1. Juan Alvaro Gallego
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Correspondence to Juan Alvaro Gallego.

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J.A.G. receives funding from Meta Platform Technologies, LLC and InBrain Neuroelectronics.

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Gallego, J.A. Neural manifolds: more than the sum of their neurons. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 26, 312 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00919-0

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