Your Brain Cares If You're Slow

Well sort of. A report issued last year by some scientists at UCBerkeley (UCSF to be exact)revealed that slow-wave oscillations in brain activity help to organize complex behaviours.

The reporting article makes some fallacious claims, but the larger story is interesting. When the brain transmits information between individual neurons this produces what they call "high-gamma waves" that result in quickly oscillating activity in the brain. In order for these small packets of information to be understood, the researchers claim, the brain recruits and coordinates large areas of the brain show global activity that oscillates in time, but at a slower rate (called theta wave oscillations) with the high-gamma activity.

Common Language:

As I see it, the brain is like a drum set. When you perform a complex activity the brain has to keep time in several different ways, all related to the overall beat. Think of the individual message (high-gamma waves) like a high hat, trilling away at a fast and sometimes infrequent rate. However, those individual messages are always coordinated with the baseline - a slower tempo that keeps the overall structure of the musical beat (here, the theta wave activity). Now, when two separate areas start dancing to the same baseline, suddenly, those two areas communicate better. And not surprisingly, when there is a really strong baseline (theta wave) the high-gamma wave activity matches up with it more; the louder the party, the more everybody dances in sync. Cool, yes?

Those of us who care about the brain should note that the gamma-wave activity appears to be linked to bottom up (perceptual) processes, and is more localized than the theta-wave activity, related to top-down activity (executive control).

I also found this article interesting because it reminded me of a concept I recently stumbled across called emergence. Hopefully, I'll be able to do a more complete entry on emergence soon, but the gist of it is this: when studying complex systems, sometimes the behaviour of the whole is more meaningful than the individual parts.

The Popular Hypothesis:
The brain organizes neural activity not only spatially, but temporally; and importantly, multiple rhythmical oscillations in cortical activity may allow the brain to process information -- related to a task -- in the same cortical areas, but for different task functions.