Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients

Despite a growing trend towards more naturalistic experiments, few single-unit datasets collected during dynamic and naturalistic stimuli have been released, and none using a full-length movie. Here, we present SUMMER (Single Unit activity during a Movie in the human Medial temporal lobe via Electrophysiological Recordings), a dataset containing recordings from 2,286 neurons from the human amygdala, hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, parahippocampal cortex, and neighboring structures during the complete presentation of the commercial film 500 Days of Summer to 29 intracranially implanted patients. We provide a rich set of frame-wise annotations spanning the entirety of the movie's 83-minute runtime, which systematically label the most salient narrative and visual elements, from characters and locations to camera cuts and main character speech. This Neurodata Without Borders-formatted dataset contains the spike times and corresponding mean waveforms from all recorded neurons, along with demographic information and electrode localizations. For technical validation, we provide spike-sorting metrics and demonstrate the tuning of individual neurons to movie features. We additionally provide decoding results from a machine learning-based pipeline for predicting movie features from neuronal population activity. To facilitate immediate use, we offer the dataset in a machine learning-ready format alongside a codebase demonstrating both neural feature and movie feature prediction tasks. This dataset offers a valuable foundation for exploring how the human brain processes semantic content, particularly in real-world contexts involving dynamic and naturalistic stimuli.