Foundation models and digital twins of the brain

You ... your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells ...’ Crick’s words capture the profound challenge of decrypting the neural code. This challenge has long been hindered by our limited ability to record activity from large neuronal populations under the complex, variable conditions in which brains evolve, and our capacity to model the intricate relationships between stimuli, behaviors, and neural activity. Recent breakthroughs are starting to overcome these barriers. Cutting-edge technologies now enable large-scale recordings, while AI can construct predictive brain models that link stimuli, neural activity, and behavior. These digital twins open the door to limitless in silico experiments, testing theories that are otherwise impossible at scale in living brains. I will discuss our work in creating these digital twins and uncovering neural representation mechanisms, which we validate with closed-loop experiments.

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