Monday, August 07, 2023

New University of Arizona study links brain waves directly to memory

Amazing stuff! Do we not all wish to have better and faster memories? Perhaps, AI to the rescue!

This still seems to be some very preliminary research confirming that we still know so little about how our memory works! As an aside: Anybody, who claims that we live in the age of the anthropocene is obscene!

"Neurons produce rhythmic patterns of electrical activity in the brain. One of the unsettled questions in the field of neuroscience is what primarily drives these rhythmic signals, called oscillations. University of Arizona researchers have found that simply remembering events can trigger them, even more so than when people are experiencing the actual event.
The researchers ... specifically focused on what are known as theta oscillations, which emerge in the brain’s hippocampus region during activities like exploration, navigation and sleep. The hippocampus plays a crucial role in the brain’s ability to remember the past. ..."

From the abstract:
"Decades of work in rodents suggest that movement is a powerful driver of hippocampal low-frequency “theta” oscillations. Puzzlingly, such movement-related theta increases in primates are less sustained and of lower frequency, leading to questions about their functional relevance. Verbal memory encoding and retrieval lead to robust increases in low-frequency oscillations in humans, and one possibility is that memory might be a stronger driver of hippocampal theta oscillations in humans than navigation. Here, neurosurgical patients navigated routes and then immediately mentally simulated the same routes while undergoing intracranial recordings. We found that mentally simulating the same route that was just navigated elicited oscillations that were of greater power, higher frequency, and longer duration than those involving navigation. Our findings suggest that memory is a more potent driver of human hippocampal theta oscillations than navigation, supporting models of internally generated theta oscillations in the human hippocampus."

New UArizona study links brain waves directly to memory | AZBio

No comments: