Neural decoding

Neural decoding is a neuroscience field concerned with the hypothetical reconstruction of sensory and other stimuli from information that has already been encoded and represented in the brain by networks of neurons. Reconstruction refers to the ability of the researcher to predict what sensory stimuli the subject is receiving based purely on neuron action potentials. Therefore, the main goal of neural decoding is to characterize how the electrical activity of neurons elicit activity and responses in the brain.

This article specifically refers to neural decoding as it pertains to the mammalian neocortex.

Overview

When looking at a picture, people's brains are constantly making decisions about what object they are looking at, where they need to move their eyes next, and what they find to be the most salient aspects of the input stimulus. As these images hit the back of the retina, these stimuli are converted from varying wavelengths to a series of neural spikes called action potentials. These patterns of action potentials are different for different objects and different colors; we therefore say that the neurons are encoding objects and colors by varying their spike rates or temporal patterns. Now, if someone were to probe the brain by placing electrodes in the primary visual cortex, they may find what appears to be random electrical activity. These neurons are actually firing in response to the lower level features of visual input, possibly the edges of a picture frame. This highlights the crux of the neural decoding hypothesis: that it is possible to reconstruct a stimulus from the response of the ensemble of neurons that represent it.