Behaviour ultimately arises from the collective dynamics of neural populations across the brain. As part of a large collaboration with academic and industrial partners in the UK, we are developing computational approaches to control the components of these dynamics that underpin specific behavioural variables using electrical stimulation. Ultimately, we are interested in bringing this translational research in primates as treatments for patients with neurological conditions such as epilepsy or paralysis.

Neurotechnologies offer an exciting new approach to target the nervous system at a systems level, complementing more traditional bottom-up treatments such as medications. We are interested in applying our basic neuroscientific findings to the development of brain-computer interfaces that either give people control of external devices or modulate their “brain states” using neuromodulation.

Science is always theory laden: The experiments that one performs and their interpretations are both influenced by the philosophical framework adopted —explicitly or implicitly— by the scientist. We are interested in whether there can be neural explanations of behaviour, meaning whether looking at neural activity can add any explanatory power to studying the behaviour itself. Among the potential neural explanations of behaviour, we focus in those based on neural manifolds, mathematical objects that capture the collective activity of neural populations and their constraints.

Spinal motoneurons are the “final common neural pathway” that integrates inputs from the entire nervous system to make muscles contract and cause movement. Recent studies suggest that our textbook understanding of motoneuron control is incomplete, since long-held principles do not seem to generalise beyond very constrained situations. We are combining carefully designed experimental paradigms with recent technological advances to record the activity of tens of motoneurons in humans to understand the neural principles of motoneuron control.

When faced with a new situation, animals including humans can learn new skills from scratch, typically following days of practice —think of learning how to play guitar. Similarly, they can also take a known skill and adapt it to new conditions —think of a guitar virtuoso taking up the bass—, during a much faster timescale. These two processes, typically referred to as motor learning and motor adaptation, also involve multiple brain regions whose interactions evolve over time.

In mammals, multiple brain regions —cortex, the basal ganglia, brainstem, and cerebellum— and the spinal cord coordinate their activity to enable the generation of skilled behaviour. Lesion studies, reversible manipulations and neural recordings suggest unique contributions of these different regions, with some ability for behavioural compensation following insults supporting partial redundancy.