I just visited the ESI SyNC 2024 conference on the topic of "Time in the brain". There, I interviewed Hugo Merchant, an electrophysiologist at UNAM in Juriquilla, Mexico. Hugo works with macaques, who can rhythmically tap their fingers synchronized to a visual or auditory beat. By studying macaque neural activity in dimensionality-reduced spaces, he wants to understand how the brain encodes different time intervals. For an overview of our conversation, see the timestamps below.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:02:57) - Monkeys rhythmic finger tapping

(00:08:27) - Timing network in pre-motor cortex and basal ganglia

(00:12:43) - Circular neural trajectories

(00:16:08) - Mapping latent space to single-cell physiology

(00:20:15) - Experimentally slowing the clock

(00:23:19) - Spatial organization of circuits

(00:27:59) - Error correction & single-trial analyses

(00:38:57) - Bayesian & SNN models