With modern electrical and optical measurement techniques, we can now measure neural activity in hundreds or thousands of neurons simultaneously. This allows for the investigation of population codes, that is, of how groups of neurons together encode information.

In 2019 today’s guest published a seminal paper with collaborators at UCL in London where analysis of optophysiological data from 10.000 neurons in mouse visual cortex revealed an intriguing population code balancing the needs for efficient and robust coding.

We discuss the paper and (towards the end) also how new AI tools may be a game-changer for neuroscience data analysis.