Brain’s frequencies have much to tell scientists | KurzweilAI

Brain’s frequencies have much to tell scientists | KurzweilAI: "“We’ve historically lumped the frequencies of brain activity that we used in this study into one phenomenon, but our findings show that there is true diversity and non-uniformity to these frequencies,” he says. “We can obtain a much more powerful ability to decode brain activity and cognitive intention by using electrocorticography to analyze these frequencies.”"

Neurobiologists find that weak electrical fields in the brain help neurons fire together

Neurobiologists find that weak electrical fields in the brain help neurons fire together: Extracellular electric fields exist throughout the living brain, though they are particularly strong and robustly repetitive in specific brain regions such as the hippocampus, which is involved in memory formation, and the neocortex, the area where long-term memories are held. "The perpetual fluctuations of these extracellular fields are the hallmark of the living and behaving brain in all organisms, and their absence is a strong indicator of a deeply comatose, or even dead, brain," Anastassiou explains...

An "unexpected and surprising finding was how already very weak extracellular fields can alter neural activity," he says. "For example, we observed that fields as weak as one millivolt per millimeter robustly alter the firing of individual neurons, and increase the so-called "spike-field coherence"—the synchronicity with which neurons fire with relationship to the field."In the mammalian brain, we know that extracellular fields may easily exceed two to three millivolts per millimeter. Our findings suggest that under such conditions, this effect becomes significant."

Interaction with neighbors: Neuronal field simulates brain activity

Interaction with neighbors: Neuronal field simulates brain activity: A so-called neural field was used in which the impact of each model neuron is defined by its distant-dependent interaction radius: close neighbors are strongly coupled and further distant neurons are gradually less interacting. Two layers one excitatory, one inhibitory, are recurrently connected such that a local input leads to transient activity that emerges focally followed by propagating activity. Therefore, the entire field dynamics are no longer determined by the sensory input alone but governed to a wide extent by the interaction profile across the neural field. Consequently, within such a model, the overall activity pattern is characterized by interactions that facilitate distant pre-activation far away from any local input.