I like this one from George & Koob 2010, especially when the goal is to convey that it's complex to the point of absurdity doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Standing up for science in Seattle - some lab members (Zhiwen, Nancy, Fabiola, and Jeremy) plus lab-friend Harsha @harshag.bsky.social. If only it seemed like there was the remotest chance anyone in the administration cared about our voices.

Combining widefield imaging and Neuropixels ephys from thalamus, striatum, and midbrain, we found that these traveling waves were shared across all these regions, and multiple areas of cortex, simultaneously. Check out the paper for details on how we quantified this.

Shockingly (to us), an open dataset of axonal reconstructions revealed that cortical neurons have axonal branching patterns that actually match this circular arrangement.

We found prominent spiral waves that were commonly centered in the middle of somatosensory and motor cortex. We could see these with widefield calcium imaging and with ephys in cortex.

In this work, Zhiwen discovered a new type of spiral wave dynamics in the mouse brain, identified a matching axonal architecture, and showed that this striking activity pattern is distributed across cortex and subcortical areas at once.