New research shows that rhythmic brain activity is key to temporarily holding important information in memory. Researchers from the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester published these findings today in current biology who found brain rhythms, or patterns of neural activity, organize the bursts of activity in the brain that maintain short-term connections.
“The idea has been that temporary storage of important information is linked to neurons in the brain that simply fire, holding onto that information until it’s no longer needed. Recent research has shown that it might not be such persistent brain activity that matters more.” for the temporary storage of information, but rather a short-term strengthening of the connections between the neurons that represent the information. Our research shows that brain rhythms are organizing these transient bursts over time,” said Ian Fiebelkorn, PhD, assistant professor of neuroscience and lead author of the study. “The rhythmic coordination of brain activity over time is important because it allows that overlapping populations of neurons store different pieces of information at the same time.
Fiebelkorn’s earlier research into how the brain processes external information, such as when browsing Times Square in New York City, made a similar discovery. He and other researchers discovered that brain rhythms help coordinate different functions associated with sampling important information in the present or switching to another source of information. In this context, brain rhythms help balance focus on the task at hand with being prepared for the unexpected.
In this new research, the researchers focused on sampling internally represented (or remembered) information. Using EEG, participants viewed images with vertical or horizontal lines and were asked to recall both the direction of the line and the location of the image. The researchers found that the strength of the internal representations of these different images alternated over time, on a time scale of less than a second, with rhythmic fluctuations in brain activity. Such coordination of brain activity over time allows the role of some neurons to overlap without conflict.
“These rhythmic brain processes could also explain how we can stay focused while multitasking, such as trying to remember an address while driving a car,” Fiebelkorn said. “Instead of concurrently focusing on these tasks, we could be switching between them on a time scale of less than a second.”
How the brain multitasks is the next step for Fiebelkorn’s lab. “What happens when the brain has to do external and internal sampling at the same time? Will we see the same kind of rhythmic temporal coordination? That’s what we’re trying to understand next. The more we can learn about how these processes normally the This work helps us understand how these things go wrong in neurological disorders.”
Other authors include Miral Abdalaziz and Zach Redding, PhD, of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Searle Scholars Program.
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