BI 226 Tatiana Engel: The High and Low Dimensional Brain

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Dec 3, 2025

Tatiana Engel is a computational neuroscientist at Princeton, focusing on neural manifolds and brain dynamics. She unveils how latent circuits connect complex cognitive functions with neural connectivity. Discussing the International Brain Laboratory, she explains its mission to standardize data sharing, enhancing collaboration in neuroscience. Tatiana also explores the surprising finding of longer timescales in subcortical neurons compared to the cortex, revealing universal patterns across brain regions. Her insights bridge theoretical models and practical applications in understanding brain activity.

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ANECDOTE

Joining A Global Whole‑Brain Project

Tatiana Engel joined the International Brain Laboratory (IBL) in 2021 after they invited theory labs to fill a slot.
IBL centralized data pipelines and staff engineers so collaborators could access standardized, well-documented whole-brain Neuropixel data quickly.

INSIGHT

Manifolds Arise From Circuit Dynamics

Engel defines a neural manifold as the restricted set of states neural activity explores during behavior.
Manifolds arise from recurrent circuit dynamics and reflect which states the connectivity makes accessible.

INSIGHT

Latent Circuits Reveal Low‑Rank Connectivity

Latent circuits are low‑dimensional dynamical models inferred to both capture neural activity and reproduce task behavior.
Fitting latent circuits uncovers a low‑rank connectivity pattern embedded within the larger network that generates task dynamics.

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Tatiana Engel runs the Engel lab at Princeton University in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She's also part of the International Brain Laboratory, a massive across-lab, across-world, collaboration which you'll hear more about. My main impetus for inviting Tatiana was to talk about two projects she's been working on. One of those is connecting the functional dynamics of cognition with the connectivity of the underlying neural networks on which those dynamics unfold. We know the brain is high-dimensional - it has lots of interacting connections, we know the activity of those networks can often be described by lower-dimensional entities called manifolds, and Tatiana and her lab work to connect those two processes with something they call latent circuits. So you'll hear about that, you'll also hear about how the timescales of neurons across the brain are different but the same, why this is cool and surprising, and we discuss many topics around those main topics.

0:00 - Intro 3:03 - No central executive 5:01 - International brain lab 15:57 - Tatiana's background 24:49 - Dynamical systems 17:48 - Manifolds 33:10 - Latent task circuits 47:01 - Mixed selectivity 1:00:21 - Internal and external dynamics 1:03:47 - Modern vs classical modeling 1:14:30 - Intrinsic timescales 1:26:05 - Single trial dynamics 1:29:59 - Future of manifolds