Novel method aims to demystify communication in the brain

From sunrise to sunset, the flow of communication across brain areas helps to facilitate every move we make. Seeing, hearing, walking, and singing, for example, are made possible by interactions between large collections of neurons that fire simultaneously in our brains. Collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the Champalimaud Foundation have teamed up for more than a decade to better understand the flow of communication in the brain using state-of-the-art experimental and statistical methods. Their latest win is a brand-new statistical method, Delayed Latents Across Groups (DLAG), that disentangles signals relayed between brain areas, even when the communication between brain areas is bidirectional.