The brain’s cerebral cortex produces perception based on the sensory information it’s fed through a region called the thalamus. “How the thalamus communicates with the cortex is a fundamental feature of how the brain interprets the world,” says Elly Nedivi, the William R. and Linda R. Young Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. Despite the importance of thalamic input to the cortex, neuroscientists have struggled to understand how it works so well given the relative paucity of observed connections, or “synapses,” between the two regions. To…
