Correction to: Nature Neuroscience https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0200-7, published online 23 July 2018.

In the version of this article initially published, it was not marked as a Historical News & Views and the supertitle was incorrect. The supertitle should have been “Historical News & Views: Neural Coding.” The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.