World’s first crowd-sourced neuroscience study aims to understand how our brains predict the future

SEATTLE, WASH.—March 13, 2025—An international collaboration of over 50 neuroscientists and researchers is pioneering a new approach to understanding the brain: the world’s first crowd-sourced and designed neuroscience study. The goal is to shed light on predictive processing, the brain’s ability to anticipate future events based on past experiences. The experiments begin today at the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington.

Our brains are constantly predicting the future, whether it’s expecting a bear after hearing a rustle in the forest or processing everyday visual information.

“Predictive coding is the idea that most of your brain areas might not be really encoding what you're seeing, but rather, might be most interested in what's different about what you're seeing compared to what you expected,” explains Colleen Gillon, Ph.D., a researcher at Imperial College London who played a leading role in the collaboration.

Using the Allen Institute’s state-of-the-art OpenScope platform, a set of tools to record signals from large populations of neurons during behavior, researchers have designed experiments to test key brain functions related to predictive processing. The study aims to uncover the trade-offs that the brain makes in different contexts when predicting what comes next. For example, imagine you're sitting on a train. If the train is moving, you naturally expect the scenery outside to flow continuously; and many brain areas are working together to predict what happens next in the long, uninterrupted sequence. But if the train is stopped and you only see a single person walking by, your brain taps into a more specialized process to anticipate that individual’s movement and uses a different set of computations.

This experiment will bridge insights from previous studies and theoretical models to understand how the brain dynamically adjusts its predictive processes depending on the context.

A New Model for Neuroscience Research 

The Allen Institute, supported by the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference, organized this first-of-its-kind international effort. A group of more than 50 scientists conducted extensive online collaboration, including more than 1,900 proposals and comments, to design the crowd-sourced study. This unprecedented level of cooperation will help the global scientific community better understand this important brain adaptation that is critical to survival.

“Despite nearly 3,000 scientific publications on the topic, current theories have often been criticized as too vague or difficult to validate experimentally. This disconnect has hampered progress in both understanding brain function and applying these insights to advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence,” noted Jérôme Lecoq, Ph.D., associate investigator at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics.

This online, collaborative model represents a potential paradigm shift in how neuroscience research is conducted. By pooling expertise from scientists around the globe and engaging in transparent discussion and decision-making, the project successfully integrates theory with experiments. The findings are expected to not only deepen our understanding of predictive processing but also inspire future collaborative efforts in neuroscience.

About the Allen Institute 
The Allen Institute is an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization founded by philanthropist and visionary, the late Paul G. Allen. The Allen Institute is dedicated to answering some of the biggest questions in bioscience and accelerating research worldwide. The Institute is a recognized leader in large-scale research with a commitment to an open science model. Its research institutes and programs include the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Allen Institute for Cell Science, the Allen Institute for Immunology, and the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics. In 2016, the Allen Institute expanded its reach with the launch of The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, which identifies pioneers with new ideas to expand the boundaries of knowledge and make the world better. For more information, visit alleninstitute.org

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