Sounds almost too neat! The subjects of this study were also special!
Memory and travelling brain waves! Wow!
"... By carefully monitoring neural activity of people who were recalling memories or forming new ones, the researchers managed to detect how a newly appreciated type of brainwave — traveling waves — influences the storage and retrieval of memories. ...
The researchers say these findings advance fundamental neuroscience research and point toward diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for memory-related disorders. ...
Brain waves are patterns of electrical oscillations that reflect the state of hundreds or thousands of individual neurons at a particular moment. One major question, which remains unsettled, is whether brain waves drive activity or simply occur as a byproduct of neural activity that was already happening. Researchers who study brain waves have tended to treat them as a stationary phenomenon that occurs in a particular region, noting when oscillations in multiple regions seem synchronized.
In this study, ... contribute to a growing understanding of these oscillations differently, as “traveling waves” that spread across the brain’s cortex, the outermost layer that supports higher cognitive processing. ...This study drew on data from participants who were being treated for drug-resistant epilepsy at hospitals across the United States. The experiments occurred while the participants had grids or strips of electrodes temporarily implanted on the surface of the brain, beneath the skull, to determine where the patients’ seizures arise. For the researchers, these electrodes offer the chance to perform experiments that wouldn’t otherwise be feasible. ..."
From the abstract:
"To support a range of behaviours, the brain must flexibly coordinate neural activity across widespread brain regions. One potential mechanism for this coordination is a travelling wave, in which a neural oscillation propagates across the brain while organizing the order and timing of activity across regions. Although travelling waves are present across the brain in various species, their potential functional relevance has remained unknown. Here, using rare direct human brain recordings, we demonstrate a distinct functional role for travelling waves of theta- and alpha-band (2–13 Hz) oscillations in the cortex. Travelling waves propagate in different directions during separate cognitive processes. In episodic memory, travelling waves tended to propagate in a posterior-to-anterior direction during successful memory encoding and in an anterior-to-posterior direction during recall. Because travelling waves of oscillations correspond to local neuronal spiking, these patterns indicate that rhythmic pulses of activity move across the brain in different directions for separate behaviours. More broadly, our results suggest a fundamental role for travelling waves and oscillations in dynamically coordinating neural connectivity, by flexibly organizing the timing and directionality of network interactions across the cortex to support cognition and behaviour."
The direction of theta and alpha travelling waves modulates human memory processing (no public access)
Traveling wave propagation directions in the memory task reveal how the brain quickly coordinates activity and shares information across multiple regions.
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