This study shows that the precise spike timing of vertebrate motoneurons has significant behavioral effect, by looking at breathing in songbirds, which is slow compared to the time scale of spike patterns. Long recordings are obtained with an MEA, together with air pressure and force recordings. Focusing on 20-ms bursts of 3 spikes, they show that shifting the middle spike by a few milliseconds has strong effects on muscle contraction and air pressure, due to nonlinearities in the neuromuscular transform. The findings support the view that firing rates correlate with various aspects of neural activity, but spikes causally determine neural activity and behavior (Brette 2015). This is a nice study, although the authors seem to have missed a previous study that shows very similar findings with more detail in an invertebrate (Aplysia) (Zhurov and Brezina, 2006).