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posted by janrinok on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the mine-just-snooze dept.

Researchers at Leland Stanford Junior University [aka Stanford University] recently found that sections of the brain are constantly cycling into and out of a state of low firing rate, similar to the state of sleep. This appears to happen throughout the brain all the time.

Understanding these newly discovered cycles requires knowing a bit about how the brain is organized. If you were to poke a pin directly into the brain, all the brain cells you'd hit would respond to the same types of things. In one column they might all be responding to objects in a particular part of the visual field - the upper right, for example.

The team used what amounts to sets of very sensitive pins that can record activity from a column of neurons in the brain. In the past, people had known that individual neurons go through phases of being more or less active, but with this probe they saw for the first time that all the neurons in a given column cycled together between firing very rapidly then firing at a much slower rate, similar to coordinated cycles in sleep.

"During an on state the neurons all start firing rapidly," said Kwabena Boahen, a professor of bioengineering and electrical engineering at Stanford and a senior author on the paper. "Then all of a sudden they just switch to a low firing rate. This on and off switching is happening all the time, as if the neurons are flipping a coin to decide if they are going to be on or off."

Those cycles, which occur on the order of seconds or fractions of seconds, weren't as visible when awake because the wave doesn't propagate much beyond that column, unlike in sleep when the wave spreads across almost the entire brain and is easy to detect.


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:42AM (#437539)

    Um, are you on the right site? We generally refer to the rocket surgery of the Mighty Buzzard when these topics come up. Timothy is dead to us. Slashdot is dead! Long live SoylentNews!

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