Unlocking the brain’s spiral symphony: a new path to understanding brain activity
Story by Lindsay Kalter • 10h ago
Imagine going to the orchestra and instead of a symphony, each musician plays solo, one movement at a time – a violinist during one piece, a cellist during the next, perhaps a clarinetist after that.
Until recently, that is the equivalent of what neuroscientists have done: recording the spikes of each neuron individually.
However, a shift is underway as researchers embrace a grander perspective that has led to a remarkable discovery: mysterious spiral brain waves that dance in the outer layer of the brain – the cerebral cortex – which may play a crucial role in organizing complex brain activity.
The cerebral cortex, a convoluted outer region of the brain, takes center stage in numerous high-level functions including reasoning, emotion, thought, memory, language and consciousness. This intricately folded area accounts for nearly half of the brain’s mass, playing an integral role in our cognitive experience.
The research, published in June by University of Sydney and Fudan University scientists in Nature Human Behaviour, may lead to fresh pathways of understanding brain disorders, like Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral palsy, the authors say.
“These emergent waves enable us to understand how different brain regions or networks are effectively coordinated during cognitive processing,” senior author and University of Sydney Associate Professor Pulin Gong told Salon. “These emergent waves enable us to understand how different brain regions or networks are effectively coordinated during cognitive processing.”
The scientists took magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans of 100 young adults between the ages 22 and 35. Participants engaged in cognitive tasks, such as solving math problems, leading to a fascinating observation: the waves exhibited a mesmerizing interplay of clockwise and counterclockwise rotations across diverse brain regions, frequently converging at the intersections of distinct brain networks.
The team analyzed the imaging data collected as part of the Human Connectome Project (HCP) using methods employed by fluid physicists studying wave patterns in turbulent flows. What has been used to, for example, create more efficient piping systems, is now helping scientists understand the brain better. The HCP is an open science project containing brain scans from hundreds of participants, who are monitored either while sitting quietly in the scanner in a resting state or performing one of several simple tasks.
The spiral waves are brain signals emerging from the collective activities of millions – potentially even billions – of neurons at the microscopic level.
“One key characteristic of these brain spirals is that they often emerge at the boundaries that separate different functional networks in the brain,” Ph.D. student and lead author Yiben Xu said in a statement. “Through their rotational motion, they effectively coordinate the flow of activity between these networks. In our research we observed that these interacting brain spirals allow for flexible reconfiguration of brain activity during various tasks involving natural language processing and working memory, which they achieve by changing their rotational directions.”
This large-scale approach to neuroscience could uncover various mechanisms underlying disorders of the nervous system, and potentially even lead to new diagnostic tests, the authors say.
In future work, the authors plan to integrate experimental recordings with modeling studies to better understand the mechanisms underlying the brain spirals and delve deeper into their functional roles in cognition.
The scientists behind this recent paper are not alone in their study of brain waves. Lyle Muller, assistant professor of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, leads a lab that has been exploring the links between traveling waves during sleep and neural plasticity – the process through which the brain learns and integrates new memories. This critical function deteriorates during neurodegenerative diseases.
Muller and his colleagues found that rotating wave patterns called spindles that occur during non-REM sleep – when our brains, breathing and heart rate slow – could enable plasticity required for storing memories during sleep. Because these spindles change with aging, understanding these wave patterns better could provide insights into how plasticity breaks down with disease, Muller said.
“While this is a fundamentally new way of studying the brain, understanding neural activity with a dynamic, systems-level approach has a lot of promise for understanding disorders of the nervous system,” Muller told Salon. “Understanding the link between traveling waves, sleep and the aging process, by analyzing direct electrical recordings that have a strong link to the activity of single neurons, is a priority for future research in my lab.”
The spiral waves seen by Gong and his team span several brain areas, Muller said and could represent an interesting mechanism for coordinating flow of information through the neural circuits of the brain.But, he said it is not yet clear how.
“Testing whether these spiral wave patterns can lead to new predictions of neural circuit dynamics and behavior, and confirming their specific underlying mechanism through computational modeling, will tell us whether these new spiral wave patterns are telling us something interesting about the symphony of neurons in the human brain,” Muller said, “or whether they may be more related to supplementary functions, like the tuning of the instruments or the lighting in the performance hall.”
Read more about the mysteries of the brain
These brain scans of dying patients may reveal what happens when you die
Do octopuses dream of electric eels? Brainwave studies find octopus and human neural similarities | Is the brain a quantum computer? A remarkable pair of studies suggests so
Related video: Writing On the Brain with Electricity (Live Science) – Search (bing.com)
© Jeannette Rose Photography via Getty Images
Scientists found that sending electricity into a brain region called the anterior precuneus created sensations of floating. During an out-of-body experience, you might first feel weightless, like you’re drifting away from the ground. Then, you might see your body from above, as if detaching from it into a phantom twin.
These startling sensations occur in an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of the population and in many different cultures. An out-of-body experience can happen when someone goes under anesthesia for surgery, has a near-death experience or wakes up in the night temporarily unable to move or speak, a phenomenon called sleep paralysis.
Now, scientists have pinned down a part of the brain that may be going haywire during out-of-body experiences. The findings, published last month in the journal Neuron,
hint at how the brain creates our everyday sense of reality and could point researchers toward new types of anesthesia in the future.
In 2019, an epilepsy patient visited Josef Parvizi, a neuroscientist at Stanford University and senior author of the recent study, and said he sometimes felt like he was floating, reports NPR’s Jon Hamilton. The patient felt “like an observer to conversations” going on in his mind, Parvizi tells the publication. The neuroscientist had a hunch that whichever brain area was undergoing unusual activity in the patient due to his epilepsy could also play a part in this altered state of consciousness.
Since that meeting, Parvizi and his team have tracked down a part of the brain that may
be involved in out-of-body experiences. The culprit is a small sliver of tissue, buried deep within the fold running down the top of the brain, called the anterior precuneus.
During the study, stimulating this area with electricity resulted in unusual sensations in eight volunteers with epilepsy. (The patients already had electrodes inserted into their brains to help with monitoring before unrelated brain surgeries.) When scientists sent electric pulses to this chunk of the brain, the volunteers did not have true out-of-body experiences, but felt like they were floating or falling. They also expressed feeling dizzy, dissociated and less focused.
“All of them reported something weird happening to their sense of physical self,”
Parvizi tells Bruce Goldman of Scope, Stanford Medicine’s blog. “In fact, three of them reported a clear sense of depersonalization, similar to taking psychedelics.”
In this way, the anterior precuneus is likely the seat of a person’s physical sense of self,
or the idea that experiences are happening to you, not to someone else. Disrupting this network in your brain could shift your point of view, making your place in the world seem unreal, the team found.
This understanding could point doctors toward potential treatments for people with trauma-related mental health problems that cause feelings of dissociation, Sahib Khalsa,
a neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research who was not involved in the study, tells Scientific American’s Diana Kwon.
The “sausage-looking piece of brain,” as Parvizi calls it to NPR, might also act as a substitute for anesthetic drugs during medical procedures in the future. Stimulating this region in study participants created slow rhythms of brain activity. These brain waves and the feelings of dissociation resemble those created by the anesthetic drug ketamine, says Patrick Purdon, an anesthesia researcher at Harvard Medical School, to NPR.
Most drugs for general anesthesia travel throughout the whole body and brain and carry some risks, since they slow heart rate and breathing. Purdon tells the publication that by sending electric pulses to this part of the brain, scientists might design new methods for anesthesia with fewer side effects. “There’s an exciting array of studies that can be conducted based on this work,” Khalsa tells Scientific American.
Is Biden’s Cognitive Ability in Decline? His Stage Exit Struggle Sparks Outrage Amid Escalating Concerns Over His Fitness to Lead (msn.com)
What Happens to Your Body if You Take Melatonin Every Night, according to a Behavioral Sleep Medicine Expert (msn.com)
700,000 US veterans follow these 8 habits that have increased their life span by up to 24 years (msn.com)
Discovering the Key to Living Longer: The Unexpected Pastime of the Earth’s Elderly Population (msn.com)
You Can Improve Your Brain Health As You Age: Promising Research Tells Us How (msn.com)
Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement (msn.com)
19 Things We All Stopped Doing in Our 40s Because It Was Time to ‘Grow Up’ (msn.com)
Want to live 20 years longer? Study finds 8 habits that can lengthen your life. (msn.com)
These Are 12 Silent Symptoms of a Heart Attack, According to Cardiologists (msn.com)
Do you sleep facing north? According to sleep expert’s you really should be (msn.com)
A fitness trainer shares the No. 1 exercise for a ‘longer life’: It has ‘major aging benefits’
Scientists Reveal the One Thing You Can Do Every Day to Improve Your Memory
Related video: Writing on the Brain with Electricity (Live Science) – Search (bing.com)
Doing these types of chores daily may reduce risk of some cancers: study (msn.com)
Science Shows ‘Super Agers’ Have These 3 Lifestyle Factors in Common (msn.com)
Most Heart Attacks Happen on This Day of the Week, Says New Study (msn.com)
Underrated Habits That Provide Significant Mental Health Benefits (msn.com)
This Simple Acronym Can Help You Tell If You’re Having A Stroke (msn.com)
The 18 most controversial songs in country music history | Yard barker
Brain care to the fore: Seven ways to take care of your brain (msn.com)
Here’s What A Doctor Says Actually Happens When You Die (msn.com)
Sure Signs That You’re Scrimping Too Much in Retirement (msn.com)
10 Healthy Habits for a Happy and Balanced Life (msn.com)
6 Diseases Your Lack of Sleep Could Be Causing (msn.com)
What Does Grey Matter in the Brain Do? (msn.com)
Brain food: 7 things neurologists avoid (msn.com)