The role of neurons is to receive and transit information.
To understand how the brain works, one has to reverse engineer its functions.
just as you might try to reverse engineer or crack a code so too scientist are using using some of the new technologies at their disposal to cracking how a neural circuits operate.
this is a very difficult problem because the brain is a very complicated organ.
the brain has different kind of cells that are all intermixed and intertwined .
particular kinds of cells in the brain sensitive to light are made using genetic tricks – this is called optogenetics.
how are neurons controlled by light ?, this is a very interesting scientific story that originates from algae and ancient forms of bacteria called archaea bacteria that make light activated ion channels.
the ion channels are put into neurons and this allows the use of light to control cells exactly as we want.
the use of new imaging tools, world smallest microscope technology are used for looking at brain activity .
The neural code in tasks such as this one involves two crucial stages in the information processing.
The first stage is sensory coding: the mapping, on each trial, of the sensory stimulus to neural population activity.
The second stage is information readout: the mapping from neural population activity to behavioral choice.
To survive, organisms must both accurately represent stimuli in the outside world and use that representation to generate beneficial behavioral actions
An important observation is that sensory coding and information readout can be based on distinct features: some features of neural activity used to encode sensory information may be ignored when information is read out, and vice versa.
