Whole-cortex / distributed recording

Recording simultaneously from many cortical areas rather than a single patch, on the premise that cognition and movement are distributed computations no local array can capture. In practice this means either one very large or multi-shank array, or several arrays and probes tiled across the surface and depth of cortex, with their signals aligned into a common frame.

The scientific payoff is access to inter-areal dynamics — how signals flow between, say, premotor, motor, and parietal cortex — that are invisible to a single site. The frontier challenges are engineering (cabling, connectors, and heat for many arrays) and analysis (co-registering channels across arrays and sessions, and separating genuine distributed structure from recording artefacts).