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Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain's inner workings

253 points · 98 comments · ibobev

  1. paimapi · · focus · HN ↗
    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

    1. Animats · · focus · HN ↗
      And still all slow stuff, 4 to 12 Hz. There must be something in the brain that clocks faster, but nobody seems to have found it yet.
      1. randomImmigrant · · focus · HN ↗
        Gamma waves go up to 100 Hz. High gamma and ripples measured deeper in the brain during memory consolidation can briefly fire up to 200 Hz.

        But speed isn’t all that useful, here. Neuronal activity is slow, but you can cancel it out, and control it mid firing. You have subdendritic and sub-axonal processing, so you can shoot off a signal, then tamp it down as it’s traveling, or ramp it up for some stretches of your axon, etc. Getting message fastest from cell A to cell B isn’t what we’ve needed. Rather, you get rich information that can have all kinds of impacts on cells along the way.

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