A neuronal ensemble is a population of nervous system cells (or cultured neurons) involved in a particular neural computation.
Background The concept of neuronal ensemble dates back to the work of Charles Sherrington who described the functioning of the CNS as the system of reflex arcs, each composed of interconnected excitatory and inhibitory neurons. In Sherrington's scheme, α-motoneurons are the final common path of a number of neural circuits of different complexity: motoneurons integrate a large number of inputs and send their final output to muscles. Donald Hebb theoretically developed the concept of neuronal ensemble in his famous book "The Organization of Behavior" (1949). He defined "cell assembly" as "a diffuse structure comprising cells in the cortex and diencephalon, capable of acting briefly as a closed system, delivering facilitation to other such systems". Hebb suggested that, depending on functional requirements, individual brain cells could participate in different cell assemblies and be involved in multiple computations. In the 1980s, Apostolos Georgopoulos and his colleagues Ron Kettner, Andrew Schwartz, and Kenneth Johnson formulated a population vector hypothesis to explain how populations of motor cortex neurons encode movement direction. This hypothesis was based on the observation that individual neurons tended to discharge more for movements in particular directions, the so-called preferred directions for individual neurons. In the population vector model, individual neurons 'vote' for their preferred directions using their firing rate. The final vote is calculated by vectorial summation of individual preferred directions weighted by neuronal rates. This model proved to be successful in description of motor-cortex encoding of reach direction, and it was also capable to predict new effects. For example, Georgopoulos's population vector accurately described mental rotations made by the monkeys that were trained to translate locations of visual stimuli into spatially shifted locations of reach targets.
Encoding
Neuronal ensembles encode information in a way somewhat similar to the principle of Wikipedia operation – multiple edits by many participants. Neuroscientists have discovered that individual neurons are very noisy. For example, by examining the activity of only a single neuron in the visual cortex, it is very difficult to reconstruct the visual scene that the owner of the brain is looking at. Like a single Wikipedia participant, an individual neuron does not 'know' everything and is likely to make mistakes. This problem is solved by the brain having billions of neurons. Information processing by the brain is population processing, and it is also distributed – in many cases each neuron knows a little bit about everything, and the more neurons participate in a job, the more precise the information encoding. In the distributed processing scheme, individual neurons may exhibit neuronal noise, but the population as a whole averages this noise out. An alternative to the ensemble hypothesis is the theory that there exist highly specialized neurons that serve as the mechanism of neuronal encoding. In the visual system, such cells are often referred to as grandmother cells because they would respond in very specific circumstances—such as when a person gazes at a photo of their grandmother. Neuroscientists have indeed found that some neurons provide better information than the others, and a population of such expert neurons has an improved signal-to-noise ratio . However, the basic principle of ensemble encoding holds: large neuronal populations do better than single neurons. The emergence of specific neural assemblies is thought to provide the functional elements of brain activity that execute the basic operations of informational processing (see Fingelkurts An.A. and Fingelkurts Al.A., 2004; 2005). Neuronal code or the 'language' that neuronal ensembles speak is very far from being understood. Currently, there are two main theories about neuronal code. The rate encoding theory states that individual neurons encode behaviorally significant parameters by their average firing rates, and the precise time of the occurrences of neuronal spikes is not important. The temporal encoding theory, on the contrary, states that precise timing of neuronal spikes is an important encoding mechanism. Neuronal oscillations that synchronize activity of the neurons in an ensemble appear to be an important encoding mechanism. For example, oscillations have been suggested to underlie visual feature binding (Gray, Singer and others). In addition, sleep stages and waking are associated with distinct oscillatory patterns. Relatively simple neuronal ensembles operate in the spinal cord where they control basic automatisms such as monosynaptic tendon reflex and reciprocal innervation of muscles. (Manjarrez E et al. 2000 Modulation of synaptic transmission from segmental afferents by spontaneous activity of dorsal horn spinal neurones in the cat. J Physiol. 529 Pt 2(Pt 2):445-60. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7793.2000.00445.x) (Manjarrez E et al. 2002 Cortical neuronal ensembles driven by dorsal horn spinal neurones with spontaneous activity in the cat. Neurosci Lett. 318(3):145-8. doi: 10.1016/s0304-3940(01)02497-1). These include both excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Central pattern generators that reside in the spinal cord are more complex ensembles for coordination of limb movements during locomotion. Neuronal ensembles of the higher brain structures is not completely understood, despite the vast literature on the neuroanatomy of these regions.
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