multineural

Multineural is an adjective used in neuroscience and related fields to describe phenomena, techniques, or devices that involve multiple neurons. The term emphasizes population-level processes as opposed to activity from a single neuron. In research, multineuronal activity refers to firing patterns recorded from large ensembles of neurons, which can be analyzed to understand population coding, distributed representation, and network dynamics. Multineuronal ensembles are often studied to reveal how information about stimuli or actions is represented across many cells.

The term is commonly used to describe recording methods that capture activity from many neurons simultaneously, such as multineural recording. It is also used for stimulation approaches that activate several neurons or sites in parallel, for example in neural prosthetics or brain–machine interfaces where multi-electrode arrays stimulate or record from multiple neurons. In experimental and computational contexts, multineural concepts underpin population coding, distributed representations, and network-level computation, distinguishing them from single-neuron analyses.

In artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience, discussions about distributed representations across large neural populations align with multineural ideas, though the specific term is less common than "neural population" or "neural network." See also population coding, multineuronal recording, neural ensemble, neural stimulation, deep brain stimulation, cochlear implant.