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Seconds before a memory pops up, certain nerve cells jolt into collective action [DOI: 10.1126/science.aax1030] [DX]. The discovery of this signal, described in the Aug. 16 Science, sheds light on the mysterious brain processes that store and recall information.
Electrodes implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients picked up neural signals in the hippocampus, a key memory center, while the patients were shown images of familiar people and places, including former President Barack Obama and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As the participants took in this new information, electrodes detected a kind of brain activity called sharp-wave ripples, created by the coordinated activity of many nerve cells in the hippocampus.
Later blindfolded, the patients were asked to remember the pictures. One to two seconds before the participants began describing each picture, researchers noticed an uptick in sharp-wave ripples, echoing the ripples detected when the subjects had first seen the images.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:20AM
A bit like a Fourier transform of an image causing the frequencies within it to fire off certain paths, which ultimately results in a kind of "spectrograph" of data in the brain, which is then triggering memory extraction.
Would make sense - works at any scale/size, in any colour or orientation, and it's exactly how we do computer-based image recognition.
Not just a singular bit-path (that's far too computer-y), but a map, changing into a frequency map, laid over a billion neurons, which then produce their own output map which is used in ever-deeper interpretation.