Many people are already talking about this book, and for good reason!

A must-read in theoretical neuroscience from Xiao-Jing Wang.

Time to test it!👨‍🔬

We teamed up with Nicola Palomero's lab to measure the NMDA/AMPA ratio across the cortex (after all the work we put in building the model, it would be rude of the data not to match our predictions).

And Voilà!🧠✨Monkeys' brains agree with us.

Very polite

Wait a second... this makes a testable prediction!🤯

Since sensory regions get more feedback projections, they should have more NMDA receptors than associative areas.

Which is counterintuitive—past studies emphasized NMDA in association areas, not sensory regions!

So, what makes this parameter space special?

✅ AMPA receptors strongly mediate feedforward pathways—so sensory info propagates fast
✅ Feedback pathways are relatively more NMDA-driven

Outside this sweet spot, we either lose bifurcation entirely or ignite the whole cortex

And here’s the cool part:

The model reproduces several experimental findings, including by @pieterroelfsema.bsky.social , @clairesergent.bsky.social & @standehaene.bsky.social, but only if we stick within this region of parameter space.

No scary math (it’s in the paper 👀), here’s the idea:

Stimuli shift the nullclines, pushing the system toward the excited state—or back to rest.

Then, a network of associative regions together switches between two states:
😴Resting(low activity)
🤩 Excited(high activity)

But of course, not everything in the cortex has been measured yet 🤷‍♀️. So, we explored the unknown parameter space.

And in a very specific region of this space, something cool happens...

🔥 A dynamic bifurcation! 🔥

To reproduce these dynamics, we built biophysical simulations of the macaque cortex—a species we have tons of detailed neural data for. 🧠🐵

This way, we can simulate neuronal activity across the whole cortex at the millisecond scale.

Let’s start broad,

Visual information enters the cortex through V1, crawls through the visual streams like a wave🌊, reaching associative regions.

Sometimes, the sensory wave🌊dies off. Other times, it triggers a cortex-wide ignition🔥.

What's behind this magic?

What happens in the brain when a stimulus enters consciousness?

We built a biophysical model of the cortex to zoom in to synaptic interactions and zoom out to whole-cortex neural dynamics during perception.

It revealed a key mechanism for ignition🧵...
www.cell.com/cell-reports...