Brain-wide representations of ongoing behavior: a universal principle?

Abstract

Recent neuronal activity recordings of unprecedented breadth and depth in worms, flies, and mice have uncovered a surprising common feature: brain-wide behavior-related signals. These signals pervade, and even dominate, neuronal populations thought to function primarily in sensory processing. Such convergent findings across organisms suggest that brain-wide representations of behavior might be a universal neuroscientific principle. What purpose(s) do these representations serve? Here we review these findings along with suggested functions, including sensory prediction, context-dependent sensory processing, and, perhaps most speculatively, distributed motor command generation. It appears that a large proportion of the brain's energy and coding capacity is used to represent ongoing behavior; understanding the function of these representations should therefore be a major goal in neuroscience research.