Higher brain functions are attributed to the cortex, a brain structure composed of a large number of neurons which are highly interconnected. A potential mechanism for neuronal information processing is the coordinated activity of populations of neurons. To approach this level of processing and to study the spatial and temporal scales of neuronal interaction requires to observe large portions of the network simultaneously. Our work focuses on the development of analysis strategies that detect the concerted activity in the brain and enable us to explore the relevance of the observed activity for behavior and cognition.

Our research goal is to gain an understanding of the relevant spatio-temporal scale(s) at which the cortex effectively interacts, and to contribute to the uncovering of its function. This requires:

• Combination of advanced experimental techniques with theoretical work on data analysis and modeling
• Development of statistical tools for data from awake behaving animals
• Data analysis to extract and condense the relevant characteristics of the system
• Interpretation of the system dynamics by construction of theoretical (biophysical and functional) models
• Intense interaction with experimenters, who provide us with their experimental data and valuable insights from the experimental perspective.

See Projects for detailed descriptions.

Selected Publications

2011

• Christian Braune, Christian Borgelt and Sonja Grün (2011) Finding Ensembles of Neurons in Spike Trains by Non-linear Mapping and Statistical Testing. Proc. 10th Int. Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA 2011, Porto, Portugal), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany (accepted)
• Denker M, Roux S, Lindén H, Diesmann M, Riehle A, Grün S (2011) The local field potential reflects surplus spike synchrony Cereb. Cortex, doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhr040 adv online free.
• Ito J, Maldonado P, Singer W, Grün S (2011) Saccade-related modulations of neuronal excitability support synchrony of visually elicited spikes Cereb. Cortex, doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhr020 adv online free
• Pipa G, Grün S. van Vreeswijk C. Impact of spike-train autostructure on probability distribution of joint-spike events (under revision)

2010

• Berger D, Borgelt C, Louis S, Morrison A, Grün S (2010) Efficient Identification of Assembly Neurons within Massively Parallel Spike Trains, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience Vol. 2010, Article ID 439648, 18 pages. DOI:10.1155/2010/439648 free
• Denker M, Riehle A, Diesmann M, Grün S (2010) Estimating the contribution of assembly activity to cortical dynamics from spike and population measures. J Comp Neurosci 29: 599-613. free
• Denker M, Finke R, Schaupp F, Grün S, Menzel R (2010) Neural correlates of odor learning in the honeybee antennal lobe. Europ J Neurosci, 31:119-133. link
• Grün S, Diesmann M, Aertsen A. Unitary Event Analysis (2010) In: Analysis of parallel spike trains. eds. Grün & Rotter. Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience, DOI:10.1007/978-1-4419-5675-0_10 [1]
• Louis S, Gerstein GL, Grün S, Diesmann M (2010) Surrogate spike train generation through dithering in operational time. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 4: 127, doi: 10.3389/fncom.2010.00127 [2]
• Louis S, Borgelt C, Grün S (2010) Generation and selection of surrogate methods for correlation analysis. In: Analysis of parallel spike trains. eds. Grün & Rotter. Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience [3]
• Louis S, Borgelt C, Grün S (2010) Complexity distribution as a measure for assembly size and temporal precision, Neural Networks, 23: 705-712 [4]
• Riehle A, Roux S, Kilavik BE, Grün S. Dynamics of motor cortical networks: the complementarity of spike synchrony and firing rate. In: Motor Control: Theories, experiments, and applications, Danion F, Latash ML (eds.), Oxford Univ Press: New York (in press)
• Staude B, Rotter S, Grün S (2010) CuBIC: cumulant based inference of higher-order correlations in massively parallel spike trains, J Comput Neurosci, 29 (1-2): 327--350, DOI: 10.1007/s10827-009-0195-x free
• Staude B, Grün S, Rotter S. (2010) Higher-order correlations in non-stationary parallel spike trains: statistical modeling and inference. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 4:16. doi:10.3389/fncom.2010.00016 free
• Staude B, Grün S, Rotter S (2010) Higher order correlations and cumulants. In: Analysis of parallel spike trains. eds. Grün & Rotter. Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience [5]

2009

• Grün S (2009) Data-driven significance estimation of precise spike correlation. J Neurophysiology, 101: 1126-1140 (invited review) link
• Grün S, Berger D, Borgelt C (2009) Identification of neurons participating in cell assemblies, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 3493-3496
• Kilavik B E, Roux S, Ponce-Alvarez A, Confais J, Grün S, Riehle A (2009) Long-term modifications in motor cortical dynamics induced by intensive practice, J Neuroscience 29(40):12653–12663 free
• Sharott A, Moll C, Engler G, Denker M, Grün S, Engel A (2009) Different subtypes of striatal neurons are selectively modulated by cortical oscillations. J Neuroscience, 29:4571-4585. link
• Shimazaki H, Amari S, Brown E N, Grün S (2009) State-space analysis on time-varying correlations in parallel spike sequences, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 3501-3504.

2008

• Grün S, Abeles M, and Diesmann M. (2008) Impact of higher-order correlations on coincidence distributions of massively parallel data. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 'Dynamic Brain - from Neural Spikes to Behaviors' , vol 5286, 96-114 link preprint
• Maldonado P, Babul C, Singer W, Rodriguez E, Berger D and Grün S. (2008) Synchronization of neuronal responses in primary visual cortex of monkeys viewing natural images. J Neurophysiol, 100: 1523–1532. (free)
• Pazienti A, Maldonado P, Diesmann M, Grün S (2008) Effectiveness of systematic spike dithering depends on the precision of cortical synchronization, Brain Research, 1225: 39-46. link
• Schrader S, Grün S, Diesmann M, Gerstein G. (2008) Detecting synfire chain activity using massively parallel spike train recording. J Neurophysiol. 100(4):2165-2176 (free)
• Staude B, Rotter S, and Grün S (2008) Can spike coordination be differentiated from rate covariation? Neural Computation 20, 1973–1999. preprint

2007

• Berger D, Warren D, Normann R, Arieli A, and Grün S (2007) Spatially organized spike correlation in cat visual cortex. Neurocomputing 70: 2112-2116. link
• Denker M, Roux S, Timme M, Riehle A, Grün S (2007) Phase synchonization between LFP and spiking activity in motor cortex during movement preparation. Neurocomputing 70: 2096-2101. link
• Nawrot M P, Boucsein C, Rodriguez-Molina V, Aertsen A, Grün S and Rotter S (2007) Serial interval statistics of spontaneous activity in cortical neurons. Neurocomputing 70: 1717-1722. link
• Pazienti A, Diesmann M, and Grün S. (2007) Bounds of the ability to destroy precise coincidences by spike dithering. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4729, pp. 428–437. link
• Pipa G, Riehle A, and Grün S (2007) Validation of task-related excess of spike coincidences based on NeuroXidence. Neurocomputing 70: 2064-2068. link

-2006

• Pazienti A and Grün S (2006) Robustness of the significance of spike correlation with respect to sorting errors. Journal of Computational Neuroscience 21:329-342.
• Czanner G, Grün S, and Iyengar S (2005) Theory of the snowflake plot and its relations to higher-order analysis methods. Neural Computation 17(7): 1456-1479.
• Pipa G, Diesmann M, and Grün S (2003) Significance of joint-spike events based on trial-shuffling by efficient combinatorial methods. Complexity 8(4): 79-86. link
• Pipa G and Grün S (2003) Non-parametric significance estimation of joint-spike events by shuffling and resampling. Neurocomputing 52-54: 31-37. link
• Schneider G and Grün S (2003) Analysis of higher-order correlations in multiple parallel processes. Neurocomputing 52-54: 771-777. link
• Grün S, Riehle A, and Diesmann M (2003) Effect of cross-trial nonstationarity on joint-spike events. Biological Cybernetics 88(5): 335-351.
• Grün S, Riehle A, Aertsen A, and Diesmann M (2003) Temporal scales of cortical interactions. Nova Acta Leopoldina 88(332): 1-18.
• Gal V, Grün S, and Tetzlaff R (2003) Analysis of multidimensional neural activity via CNN-UM. International Journal Neural Systems 13(6): 479-487.
• Grün S, Diesmann M, and Aertsen A (2002) `Unitary Events' in multiple single-neuron activity. II. Non-Stationary data. Neural Computation 14(1): 81-119.
• Grün S, Diesmann M, and Aertsen A (2002) `Unitary Events' in multiple single-neuron activity. I. Detection and significance. Neural Computation 14(1): 43-80.
• Gal V, Grün S, and Tetzlaff R (2002) Analyzing multidimensional neural activity via CNN-UM. In Tetzlaff R, editor, Proc 7th IEEE Intern Workshop on Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications, pages 243-250. World Scientific, Singapore.
• Aertsen A, Diesmann M, Gewaltig M-O, Grün S, and Rotter S (2001) Neural dynamics in cortical networks -- precision of joint-spiking events. In Bock G and Goode J, editors, Complexity in biological information processing, volume 239 of Novartis Foundation Symposium 2001, pages 193-207. Wiley, Chichester.
• Grün S, Wagner H, Carr C, and Aertsen A (2001) Binaural interaction in the nucleus laminaris of the barn owl: A quantitative model. Research Report BrainWorks 1991-01, Neurobiology & Biophysics, ISSN 1615-2042, Inst. Biology 3, Albert-Ludwigs Univ, Freiburg, Germany.
• Riehle A, Grammont F, Diesmann M, and Grün S (2000) Dynamical changes and temporal precision of synchronized spiking activity in monkey motor cortex during movement preparation. Journal of Physiol (Paris) 94(5-6): 569-582.
• Grün S, Diesmann M, Grammont F, Riehle A, and Aertsen A (1999) Detecting unitary events without discretization of time. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 94:67-79.
• Grün S and Rotter S (1999) Concepts of neuronal cooperativity in the cortex. In Elsner N and Eysel U, editors, From Molecular Neurobiology to Clinical Neuroscience, pages 359-363, Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart.
• Riehle A, Grün S, Diesmann S, and Aertsen S (1997) Spike synchronization and rate modulation differentially involved in motor cortical function. Science 278: 1950-1953.
• Riehle A, Grün S, Aertsen A, and Requin J (1996) Signatures of dynamic cell assemblies in monkey motor cortex. In von der Malsburg C, von Seelen W, Vorbrüggen J C, and Sendhoff B, editors. Artificial Neural Networks - ICANN '96, pages 673-678, Berlin, Springer.
• Martignon L, von Hasseln H, Grün S, Aertsen S, and Palm G (1995) Detecting higher-order interactions among the spiking events in a group of neurons. Biological Cybernetics 73: 69-81. link

Books

Grün S. and Rotter S. (eds.) Analysis of Parallel Spike Trains (2010) Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience, Volume 7, Springer New York, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-5675-0 [6]

• Grün S (1996) Unitary Joint-Events in Multiple-Neuron Spiking Activity: Detection, Significance, and Interpretation. Reihe Physik, Band 60. Verlag Harri Deutsch, Thun, Frankfurt/Main, ISBN 3-8171-1506-7.

Selected Abstracts

can be found here

CV