Neuronal sequences in population bursts encode information in human cortex

Neural coding has traditionally been examined through changes in firing rates and latencies in response to different stimuli1–5. However, populations of neurons can also exhibit transient bursts of spiking activity, wherein neurons fire in a specific temporal order or sequence6–8. The human brain may utilize these neuronal sequences within population bursts to efficiently represent information9–12, thereby complementing the well-known neural code based on spike rate or latency. Here we examined this possibility by recording the spiking activity of populations of single units in the human anterior temporal lobe as eight participants performed a visual categorization task. We find that population spiking activity organizes into bursts during the task. The temporal order of spiking across the activated units within each burst varies across stimulus categories, creating unique stereotypical sequences for individual categories as well as for individual exemplars within a category. The information conveyed by the temporal order of spiking activity is separable from and complements the information conveyed by the units’ spike rates or latencies following stimulus onset. Collectively, our data provide evidence that the human brain contains a complementary code based on the neuronal sequence within bursts of population spiking to represent information.