Communication in Brain Circuits and Systems: a Primer

Multi-level neural communication across spatial and temporal scales supports various functions in an animal brain, including sensing, movement, memory formation, and decision-making. In this primer, we provide examples of the vast structural and functional mechanisms that implement communication, with a focus on cellular, network and behavioral levels. We then discuss the growing neural data and computational models that can be used to study these mechanisms with a few hands-on model examples. To unify the presented topics, we suggest a computational model to test a recently proposed spatial computing hypothesis for item encoding and retrieval in the brain during a short-term memory task.