When chickadees stash their seeds, the same part of their brain that tells them where they are forms a barcode that's linked to the storage site, so they can later recall it from the place cue alone. Click through the three steps below to run the network yourself.
Each bar is one neuron's activity. A smooth hump means a place code; a jagged, sparse pattern is a barcode.
The same 800 neurons drawn as a network — brighter dots are more active. Once you've cached, show stored replays the barcode held in memory.
Live model from chingf/barcodes (Fang et al., 2025, eLife): divisive-normalized
RNN dynamics with one-shot Hebbian storage. 800 neurons, 100-state circular track — scaled down from the paper's
5000 to run in-browser.
Adapted by Chenguang Li for Dendrite @ Substack.