A high-dimensional population code in the bat motor cortex during natural dexterous flight

Elucidating the neural computations underlying natural, complex movement remains a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Bat flight presents a formidable motor control challenge, requiring hand-like wings whose many degrees of freedom must be precisely coordinated to enable rapid three-dimensional (3D) maneuvers. Here, we performed large-scale wireless recordings from the wing motor cortex of freely flying bats, combined with 3D tracking of wing kinematics. Despite the complexity of flight control, bats repeatedly executed accurate flights through precise adjustments of individual wingbeats. Surprisingly, motor cortical activity was not dominated by the wingbeat cycle. Instead, neurons were sparsely active, exhibiting mixed selectivity for flight kinematics and variable entrainment to the wingbeat phase reaching millisecond-scale precision. This yielded a high-dimensional population code driven by successive wingbeats occupying distinct neural states. These findings reveal a mode of motor cortical population dynamics expressed during natural dexterous movement that is not well captured by prevailing views derived from constrained paradigms.