Recent neuronal activity recordings of unprecedented breadth and depth in worms, flies, and mice have uncovered a surprising common feature: brain-wide behavior-related signals. These signals pervade, and even dominate, neuronal populations thought to function primarily in sensory processing. Such convergent findings across organisms suggest that brain-wide representations of behavior might be a universal neuroscientific principle. What purpose(s) do these representations serve? Here we review these findings along with suggested functions, including sensory prediction, context-dependent sensory processing, and, perhaps most speculatively, distributed motor command generation. It appears that a large proportion of the brain's energy and coding capacity is used to represent ongoing behavior; understanding the function of these representations should therefore be a major goal in neuroscience research.

中文翻译：

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持续行为的全脑表征：通用原则？

最近的蠕虫，苍蝇和小鼠神经元活动记录的空前广度和深度前所未有，发现了一个令人惊讶的共同特征：与大脑行为相关的信号。这些信号遍布甚至主导着被认为主要在感觉处理中起作用的神经元群体。跨生物体的这种趋同发现表明，行为的全脑表征可能是普遍的神经科学原理。这些表示有什么目的？在这里，我们回顾了这些发现以及建议的功能，包括感觉预测，与上下文相关的感觉处理以及可能是最推测的分布式电机命令生成。看来，大脑的能量和编码能力中有很大一部分被用来代表正在进行的行为。