Thread

1. randomImmigrant · 1790804308 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. monideas · 1790834913 · focus · HN ↗

      Reminds me of when non-coding DNA was thought to be useless, it was labeled “Junk DNA”, and then it was realized it played a role in regulating gene expression.

      1. madaxe_again · 1790838243 · focus · HN ↗

         Reminds me of when we thought proteins were the be all and end all and this goopy stuff bundled up in chromosones was just some useless goop.

         There's a pattern which we see again and again in nature, where incredibly complex structures and behaviours emerge from interference and feedback patterns between waves - from deciding whether your toenails grow on your face or your feet to the formation of planets, from ant colony foraging and spacing to whether it will rain on Tuesday.

         I suspect elements of cognition are similar.

      2. bcjdjsndon · 1790844350 · focus · HN ↗

         Does make me worry about the competence of scientists that they make that mistake.

         1. coldtea · 1790845460 · focus · HN ↗

            Given that this was the scientific consensus, "the competence of scientists that they make that mistake" compared to whom? Laymen? I'd still bet on the scientists.

            If there's a real concern is not about "the competence of scientists that they make that mistake", but about the certainty of our grasp of the scientific facts in general.

            It's not that those scientists were incompetent.

            It's more like "science in general doesn't know as much as solidly as we'd like to think" about the matter.

            1. eviks · 1790847873 · focus · HN ↗

               Compared to competent scientists

               1. jibalt · 1790850037 · focus · HN ↗

                  "the competence of scientists compared to competent scientists" is incoherent and, well, incompetent at multiple levels in this context.

                  1. eviks · 1790851684 · focus · HN ↗

                     Indeed, reading comprehension at some level is required for the competence to emerge! The competence of one group of scientists is compared to that of the another group of scientists. Feel free to point at your next stumbling block
                  2. jibalt · 1790883451 · focus · HN ↗

                     Yet more incompetence (and quite a case of projection) in the response ... as the GP made clear, the context isn't about a comparison between different groups of scientists. The GGP made a sweeping generalization about the entire community of scientists -- as the GP said, this was the scientific consensus. There wasn't some separate group of "competent scientists" who believed that "junk DNA" wasn't junk, as there was no evidence that it wasn't. One is not competent merely by virtue of making a baseless claim. The fact is that the scientists who subscribed to the consensus were generally competent, as scientists generally are ... far more competent, certainly, than bozos making absurdly ignorant and cognitively inept claims that lack of knowledge of the function of "junk DNA" was an indication of scientific incompetence as opposed to some other group of people who were competent scientists.

                     I won't respond further to such cluelessness.

         2. yourapostasy · 1790853874 · focus · HN ↗

            Worry more about the financial incentives built into every nook and cranny of our economic system to the point it permeates scientific funding, that make it an asymmetric bet to say anything even if it is proven wrong later, than to spend a lot and say in the present, "I got nothing". Modern science is more an industrial complex where errors and overstatements are often the rational outcome of perverse economic incentives. More commonly known as publication bias or the file drawer problem.
         3. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790857867 · focus · HN ↗

            Calling it a "mistake" vs just a lack of knowledge is a weird way of framing it. There was much discussion of "junk DNA" (now referred to as non-coding DNA) for years/decades - everyone realized it was an anomaly to be explained, but no-one knew the explanation. This comprises the vast majority (98%) of DNA - so clearly it was there for some reason.
      3. Kim_Bruning · 1790849348 · focus · HN ↗

         This is like calling the python in a flask app "junk html" ;-)
      4. randomImmigrant · 1790867046 · focus · HN ↗

         That was at least a relatively short lived belief. That glia, the other half of brain cells, got ignored and relegated to “support” for so long is, to my mind, the worse mistake: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;these-cells-spark-electricity-in-the-brain-theyre-not-neurons-20231018&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;these-cells-spark-electricity...

         That said, science wouldn’t need to be self-correcting if it was always right.

         Science is like a group of people with lights of varying strength exploring a dense forest at night. We often mix up shadows and caves and rocks and animals and people… there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation. To demand otherwise, to demand some kind of mistake free march in good order as if we’re on a brightly lit field, is to ignore that we are… ingnorant.

   2. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790858609 · focus · HN ↗

      Regardless of how these large scale coordinated dynamics arose, initially functional and selected for, or just epiphenomena (coupled oscillators?), it seems that they HAVE to have become functional (presumably longer range inter-region communication and sequencing) since timing does matter.

      If we assume that brain waves do have (have to have) some effect, then it seems most likely that the effect is either beneficial or detrimental compared to the alternative of uncorrelated brain activity, and therefore is being selected for or against, and as the production of millions of years of evolution, it seems the logical conclusion is that there is some functional benefit to it. The alternative is that the functional effect is merely benign, neither beneficial or detrimental, but this intuitively seems less likely.

      1. randomImmigrant · 1790866756 · focus · HN ↗

         I’m with you on finding it hard to think they’re just epiphenomena of coupled oscillators. And from the timing perspective and their spatial spread, I think it’s a solid hypothesis they actually contribute to the coupling.

         That actually happens in the narrow spatial scale of ephaptic coupling already, where neighboring neurons can sense one another firing and get primed to fire, which helps with synchronization.

         Where there’s still debate is in these larger waves, which sweep through very diverse architectures.

         And again, part of the answer may be to look at astrocytes, since they can actually tune their syncitium, and some at least can give out glutamate as a signal, and are electrically active: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;these-cells-spark-electricity-in-the-brain-theyre-not-neurons-20231018&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;these-cells-spark-electricity...

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