Flexible electrodes help track the brain's changing representations

A Nature Biomedical Engineering study published on October 6 uses tissue-like flexible arrays to track neurons in mice over months. The researchers study representational drift, where neural activity associated with a repeated stimulus changes even when behavior remains stable.

They align population-level activity across sessions and use that alignment to maintain decoder performance over longer periods. Stable recording and stable interpretation are related but different problems: keeping the same electrode in place does not guarantee that the signal-to-meaning relationship stays fixed.

The experiments are in mice. They offer a route for studying decoder durability, rather than a demonstrated long-term human BCI.