Holding information in mind is accompanied by coordination of rotating brain waves in the prefrontal cortex, a phenomenon that may convey specific advantages, a new study suggests. The work was performed by scientists at the Picower Institute of Learning and Memory at MIT.
After more than a century of study, the significance of brain waves – the coordinated, rhythmic electrical activity of groups of brain cells – is still not fully known. An especially underappreciated aspect of the phenomenon is that waves spatially propagate, or "travel," through brain regions over time.
May 12, 2021MIT
In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brain’s normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels, waking the brain back up and restoring arousal.
“There’s a folk psychology or tacit assumption that what anesthesia does is simply ‘turn off’ the brain,” says Earl Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and co-senior author of the study in
Caption: Researchers measured how strongly brain waves were synchronized before, during, and after anesthesia with propofol. Data from the research shows strong increases in synchrony only in very slow frequencies (deep red color along bottom) between the thalamus and four cortical regions while animals were unconscious. Credits: Image courtesy of the Miller/Brown labs, Picower Institute
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In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brain’s normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels,