Brain Inspired BI 236 Liset de la Prida: Neurons, Ripples, and Manifolds
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Apr 22, 2026 
Liset de la Prida, director at the Centro de Neurociencias Cajal and leader of a neural circuits lab, explores hippocampal sharp wave ripples and neural manifolds. She explains ripple diversity across states, how ripples broadcast to cortex, and links ripple replay to low-dimensional population trajectories. She also discusses cell-type and deep vs superficial CA1 differences that shape manifold geometry and representation.
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Ripples Form A Diverse Continuum
- Sharp wave ripples are a diverse family of events rather than a single uniform phenomenon.
- Liset de la Prida shows ripple waveforms form a continuum mapped to different inputs (CA3, CA2, entorhinal) and behavioral states like awake versus sleep.
Ripples Are Brief Synchronous Broadcasts
- Ripples act as brief, highly synchronous population outputs that can broadcast to many downstream regions.
- de la Prida describes ~30% population firing increases during ripples that propagate through CA1→subiculum and engage prefrontal, accumbens and other regions.
Ripples Replay Short Manifold Trajectories
- Neural manifolds describe population trajectories through high-dimensional activity space and ripples replay short segments of those trajectories.
- de la Prida framed ripples as revisiting short parts of the manifold built from population vectors of many neurons.
