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Brain rhythms and learning

02.03.2015

It is known that the activity of brain neurons develops into waves or rhythms that can be seen on an electroencephalogram: alpha rhythm, beta rhythm, gamma rhythm, and others. Rhythms replace each other depending on what exactly the person is doing at the moment. For example, alpha waves appear during rest, when we are not busy with anything, but we are not sleeping either; delta waves correspond to deep dreamless sleep; if attention is focused on some task, then this can be seen from the fast theta and gamma rhythms. Moreover, different areas of the brain can generate different waves because they perform different tasks. By observing the dynamics of rhythms, one can say a lot about how the "departments" of the brain communicate with each other and how responsibilities are distributed in solving cognitive tasks related to memory, attention, etc.

In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience, Earl Miller and Scott Brincat of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describe the changes in brain wave activity that accompany memory and learning. Researchers were not interested in memory in general, but in its form, which is called explicit: it is responsible, for example, for the connection between objects, events, etc. We associate a person’s appearance with his name, but a certain event with the place where it happened, as times thanks to explicit memory. It is formed with active conscious efforts on the part of the individual, and it exists not only in humans, but also in animals.

In the experiment, the monkeys were shown pairs of pictures, so strong links had to be established between some of the pictures. The monkeys learned by trial and error: they were shown pictures over and over again, and they had to guess whether they were related or not. If the animal correctly guessed that the depicted objects were related to each other, it was given a treat. Simultaneously, the researchers recorded activity in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, two areas of the brain that play a key role in learning. It turned out that the frequency of the waves in them changed depending on whether the monkey gave the correct or incorrect answer. If the result corresponded to the expectation, then a beta rhythm appeared with a frequency of 9-16 Hz. If the answer was wrong, then the frequency dropped to 2-6 Hz, which corresponded to the theta rhythm.

Memorization is associated with the formation of new neural circuits: synaptic connections between neurons maintain the "memory cell" in working order. It was previously shown that the strength of synapses (that is, their strength and efficiency) depends on the rhythm in which nerve cells have to work: if beta frequencies increase intercellular contacts, then theta frequencies, on the contrary, weaken them. Together with the new results, we can imagine the following model: the correct answer stimulates beta activity in the brain, which, in turn, strengthens the formed neural circuits - after all, they remember everything correctly. If not, then theta activity will invalidate the wrong memory.

This is not the first work on the relationship between brain waves and memory. So, last year, Nobel laureate Suzumi Tonegawa published an article with colleagues that discussed similar things - how the brain corrects memory if it sees an incorrect result. Those experiments were done on mice and focused on the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex (another well-known memory center). Then neuroscientists discovered that gamma-rhythms serve as a signal for correcting information, synchronizing the work of two areas of the brain.

Of course, the process of memorization is too complex to be reduced simply to the alternation of several types of waves. By changes in electrical rhythms, we can judge the behavior of fairly large ensembles of cells and entire sections of the brain at the moment when an individual needs to remember some new information. Why one type of rhythm replaces another, what mechanism links such a replacement with correct or incorrect memory, researchers have yet to find out. Although it is possible that in the future we will have memory stimulants that will help the brain switch to the right rhythm when we need to remember something.

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