The animation behind this page is a live simulation of 1,000 neurons arranged as a population raster plot — each row is a neuron, each dot is a spike, and time runs right to left.

Each neuron has a preferred direction. Move your cursor and the neurons whose tuning matches the direction of motion fire more than the rest.

Hover any button on this page and you'll see a brief, sparse flash of activity — the small subpopulation of neurons whose preferred direction matches that button. Buttons with related meanings recruit overlapping neurons; unrelated buttons drive disjoint populations.

Click and hold anywhere to trigger a Reverberating Super Burst — a coordinated wave of activity that ripples across the population. RSBs show up in cultures of stem-cell-derived neurons during early development, and are hypothesized to strengthen network connections as neurons wire together.

As you click around and hold to produce RSBs, the network's propensity for spontaneous network bursts increases.

The strip at the bottom is the summed population firing rate — a rough stand-in for a local field potential (LFP). Watch it spike when an RSB fires.

For the math and neuroscience behind the simulation — tuning curves, Poisson spiking, population codes, decoding — read the deep dive:

Tuning curves — the explainer →