Brain Waves Are Far More Complex Than Scientists Thought
Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
New research reveals that traveling waves in the brain are not just simple planar oscillations but include spiral and concentric patterns. These complex waves may help reorganize the brain in real time to meet behavioral demands, potentially playing a central role in memory and cognition. The findings challenge traditional views and open new avenues for understanding how the brain processes information.
Maybe the planar waves are just the outer arms, where you're missing the eye of the storm. In a hurricane you only feel the wind going in one direction. You don't know that it is spinning unless you're right there by the eye.
- randomImmigrant
For context, the debate in the field has been whether these are epiphenomena of the actual neuronal activity, or a meaningful driver of further activity.
I don’t think these studies quite rest the case. As Buzsaki comments in the article, the action is in the cells to create these waves. Do the waves themselves get measured and impact what happens next? The issue at hand is: synaptic currents are stronger and we know neurons respond to them. The wave behavior is in the extracellular fluid as well, and that part we have evidence neurons don’t respond much to.
That said, thing the article doesn’t talk about is astrocytes. Especially in the cortex, most synapses are tripartite. There’s an astrocytic end foot that sheathes the synapse and regulates how much of the bulk extracellular space has access to the synapse. And one astrocyte can touch thousands of synapses and in humans, hundreds of thousands. They also form a syncitium, through gap junctions/electrical synapses.
Do astrocytes respond to the extracellular wave behavior, which potentially changes the extent and behavior of the syncitium, and thus impact the neurons they touch?
That’s still an open question but that’s what I’d be interested to find out more about.
- paimapi
Bit of a sensationalist title - EEG/iEEG measurements have led to worthwhile clinical outcomes but also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
More accurate, much less sexy title: Intracranial Recordings Uncover Spiral and Concentric Brain Waves During Memory Tasks" (study completed only on small cohorts of epilepsy patients performing constrained memory tasks).
No inner workings revealed or laid bare, just another piece of evidence contributing to a small part of the debate in cortical electrophysiological studies on whether or not some data measures can be discarded as the downstream, messy noise of the neurons firing or actual, high-fidelity signals of activity
- 2001zhaozhao
I think there will be a lot to be learned if we can scale up the high resolution measurement methods here to map exactly how brainwaves travel when performing specific tasks.
Maybe they should recruit experienced meditators who can give accurate introspective self-reports to be compared to the measurements, then we would start to have a relatively confident map between brain physiology and psychology. (e.g. X brain pattern in Y region specifically corresponds to the Z step of reasoning when solving the problem)
- breckinloggins
My hypothesis:
Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.
I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.
One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”
- tholman
I know it's anecdotal and irrelevant to the real science, but whenever neuroscience comes up, I think about the Exhalation short story Ted Chian, about a civilization with brains that rely on air pressure, and a deep explanation of these alien brains and at the same time made me appreciate that we also still know so little about our own, they may as well be the same.