Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 7 hours ago
Juan Gallego discusses how manifolds are transforming how we think about how populations of neurons coordinate their activity.
Show notes: braininspired.co/podcast/234
Patreon (full episodes, archive, Discord, more): patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
Music by @dunovank
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership: thetransmitter.org/partners
Check out this story:
Neural manifolds: Latest buzzword or pathway to understand the brain?: thetransmitter.org/neural-dynamics/neural-manifolds-latest-buzzword-or-pathway-to-understand-the-brain
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Juan Gallego runs the Neocybernetics Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, affiliated with the neuroscience of disease and neuroscience programs, and the centre for restorative neurotechnology.
Juan has worked a lot on neural manifolds - the mathematical objects neuroscience is using more and more to describe how big populations of neurons coordinate their activity to do useful things. In fact, he recently gave a short talk that he titled The Manifold Manifesto, because he was asked to be provocative. And he was provocative, suggesting that manifolds are real - as real as chairs and tables are, that they have causal power, and they might be a target of evolution. Of course he talked about his own and others work to support those claims. So today we discuss many of those themes, through the lens of his own and others work, and we talk about what keeps him up at night about the possible limits of using manifolds to connect brain activity with behavior and mental phenomena.
He's not just a manifold person, though. Juan is more broadly interested in motor control and how brains do it.
We also discuss his work in patients with spinal cord injuries, who don't have enough nerve connections to their muscles to actually move, but have enough nerve connections that some signal gets through. Juan and his colleagues can detect that little bit getting through, and use it to infer what behaviors the patients intend to do, and they can use that information to control actions in a computer simulation. The hope is that this will translate to controlling prosthetics to give spinal cord injury patients their mobility again.
0:00 - Intro
4:37 - Manifolds
14:30 - Strengths and weaknesses
24:32 - Conserved manifolds across animals and species
34:31 - Causality and manifolds
47:29 - Constraints and causes
51:05 - What to measure
58:55 - Complexity and manifolds
1:10:29 - Juan's background
1:14:08 - Prosthetics for spinal cord injuries
1:41:06 - Integrating across behaviors and timescales
1:46:56 - Conjoint specification of action by neocortex and striatum.
Juan Gallego discusses how manifolds are transforming how we think about how populations of neurons coordinate their activity.
Show notes: braininspired.co/podcast/234
Patreon (full episodes, archive, Discord, more): patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
Music by @dunovank
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership: thetransmitter.org/partners
Check out this story:
Neural manifolds: Latest buzzword or pathway to understand the brain?: thetransmitter.org/neural-dynamics/neural-manifolds-latest-buzzword-or-pathway-to-understand-the-brain
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released: thetransmitter.org/newsletters
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
Juan Gallego runs the Neocybernetics Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, affiliated with the neuroscience of disease and neuroscience programs, and the centre for restorative neurotechnology.
Juan has worked a lot on neural manifolds - the mathematical objects neuroscience is using more and more to describe how big populations of neurons coordinate their activity to do useful things. In fact, he recently gave a short talk that he titled The Manifold Manifesto, because he was asked to be provocative. And he was provocative, suggesting that manifolds are real - as real as chairs and tables are, that they have causal power, and they might be a target of evolution. Of course he talked about his own and others work to support those claims. So today we discuss many of those themes, through the lens of his own and others work, and we talk about what keeps him up at night about the possible limits of using manifolds to connect brain activity with behavior and mental phenomena.
He's not just a manifold person, though. Juan is more broadly interested in motor control and how brains do it.
We also discuss his work in patients with spinal cord injuries, who don't have enough nerve connections to their muscles to actually move, but have enough nerve connections that some signal gets through. Juan and his colleagues can detect that little bit getting through, and use it to infer what behaviors the patients intend to do, and they can use that information to control actions in a computer simulation. The hope is that this will translate to controlling prosthetics to give spinal cord injury patients their mobility again.
0:00 - Intro
4:37 - Manifolds
14:30 - Strengths and weaknesses
24:32 - Conserved manifolds across animals and species
34:31 - Causality and manifolds
47:29 - Constraints and causes
51:05 - What to measure
58:55 - Complexity and manifolds
1:10:29 - Juan's background
1:14:08 - Prosthetics for spinal cord injuries
1:41:06 - Integrating across behaviors and timescales
1:46:56 - Conjoint specification of action by neocortex and striatum.
