TY - JOUR T1 - A spiral attractor network drives rhythmic locomotion JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/104562 SP - 104562 AU - Angela M. Bruno AU - William N. Frost AU - Mark D. Humphries Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/30/104562.abstract N2 - The joint activity of neural populations often contains an embedded low-dimensional signal. Though usually interpreted as the signature of some underlying dynamical system, it is unknown if this is true. By imaging Aplysia’s pedal ganglion during fictive locomotion, here we show that its population-wide activity arises from a low-dimensional spiral attractor. Evoking locomotion moved the population into a low-dimensional, periodic, decaying orbit - a spiral - in which it behaved as a true attractor, converging to the same orbit when evoked, and returning to that orbit after transient perturbation. We found the same attractor in every preparation, and could predict motor output directly from its orbit, yet individual neurons’ participation changed across consecutive locomotion bouts. From these results, we propose that only the low-dimensional dynamics for movement control and not the high-dimensional population activity are consistent within and between nervous systems. ER -