Extended Data Fig. 9: Neuronal assemblies lose their functional specificity under anesthesia.

a, Schematics depicting the rationale for the selection of the three functional populations defined in Fig. 7. For each neuron the probability to participate in a spontaneous event (blue bars) and in a sound evoked event (red bars) is calculated. b, Top left: For a sample session under anesthesia, Pearson’s correlation matrix computed with all available neurons. Bottom left: Average sound and spontaneous event cluster reproducibility under anesthesia. The neurons are divided into 3 groups based on their activity in the awake state before anesthesia application. From left to the right: Same as the first matrix, but only for Nonspecific neurons; only for predominantly sound responsive neurons (Resp); only predominantly spontaneously active neurons (Spont); only for Resp+Spont. Differences between the first panel and subsequent ones were not significant, (Wilcoxon rank sum test, n = 5 mice, p = 0.063 for all differences). c, Time course of the mean firing rate profiles for each of the 3 groups of neurons in all awake mice (n = 11). Note that the graph presented in Fig. 7b corresponds to only 5 mice that were recorded both in awake and anesthetized conditions. Error bands indicate standard deviation around the mean. d, Average prediction accuracy for all sounds for the 4 sub-populations (n = 11 mice, p = 0.11, p = 0.00001, One-way ANOVA test). (ISO, isoflurane; Nonsp, non-specific; ns, not significant; pop., population; Post, post stimulation; Pre, prior to stimulation; Resp, responsive; Spont, spontaneous; stim., stimulation; *** indicates p < 0.001). For all box-and-whiskers plots, the red mark indicates the median, and the bottom and top edges of the box indicate the 25th and 75th percentiles, respectively. The whiskers extend to the most extreme data points not considered outliers, and the outliers are plotted individually using red crosses. All tests are two-sided.