- Human visual cortex representations may be much higher-dimensional than earlier work suggested, but are these higher dimensions of cortical activity actually relevant to behavior? Our new paper tackles this by studying how different people experience the same movies. 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...
- Our findings show that individual neural patterns during movie viewing span orders of magnitude of dimensions—and these high-dimensional codes predict how people describe their experiences.
- Recent work from our lab revealed the scale-free structure of cortical image representations in large-scale studies of humans and monkeys. Stimulus-related information is distributed across thousands of dimensions, extending far beyond the few dominant components typically studied.
- Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
- In our new work, we find that the ways individual brains differ are *not* constrained to a few dominant patterns. We find distinct patterns in how individual brains process natural movies along many latent dimensions, and these differences are reliable across different movies.
- These neural differences matter! Fine-grained structure in higher dimensions of cortical activity predicts behavioral differences during recall—even after accounting for coarse-scale effects captured by standard methods.
- We also found that neural dimensionality is related to the concreteness of each subject’s recollection. Subjects who focus on concrete details, as opposed to abstract aspects of the movies, tend to share more dimensions with others.
- The upshot: your subjective experience isn't encoded in a low-dimensional subspace of cortical activity. It emerges from the full high-dimensional geometry of cortical population responses—most of which we've been missing with conventional approaches.Jan 30, 2026 18:53
- So yes—high-dimensional neural codes do shape behavior. Not only do stimulus representations scale unboundedly, individual differences span the full dimensional capacity of cortical codes. We're only beginning to understand the rich structure that makes each brain unique.
