Electric Fields May Represent Information Held in Working Memory
March 15th, 2022Via: MIT:
As the brain strives to hold information in mind, such as the list of groceries we need to buy on the way home, a new study suggests that the most consistent and reliable representation of that information is not the electrical activity of the individual neurons involved but an overall electric field they collectively produce.
Indeed, whenever neuroscientists have looked at how brains represent information in working memory, they’ve found that from one trial to the next, even when repeating the same task, the participation and activity of individual cells varies (a phenomenon called “representational drift”). In a new study in NeuroImage, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and the University of London found that regardless of which specific neurons were involved, the overall electric field that was generated, provided a stable and consistent signal of the information the animals were tasked to remember.
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The researchers hypothesize that the field even appears to be a means the brain can employ to sculpt information flow to ensure the desired result. By imposing that a particular field emerge, it directs the activity of the participating neurons.
Indeed, that’s one of the next questions the scientists are investigating: Could electric fields be a means of controlling neurons?
“We are now using this work to ask whether information flows from the macroscale level of the electric field down to the microscale level of individual neurons,” Pinotsis says. “To make the analogy with the orchestra, we are now using this work to ask whether a conductor’s style changes the way an individual member of an orchestra plays her instrument.”
UK Research and Innovation, the Office of Naval Research and the JPB Foundation provided support for the research.
