Order matters: neurons in the human brain fire in sequences that encode information

Neuronal population activity in the anterior temporal lobe of the human brain organizes into bursts of spiking in response to visual images. The specific sequence of neuronal firing in these bursts encodes category- and exemplar-related information about these images, complementing the well-established role of firing rates in neural coding. A timing-based code for semantic knowledge in humans complements the established role of firing rates in neural coding.