Scientists are investigating the hidden signals in the brain's electrical chatter to gain new insight on aging, sleep, and more age-old mysteries that have baffled researchers for generations.
In January 2020, Janna Lender, a member of the Society for Neuroscience and a physician at the University Clinic for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine presented findings that hint at a way to define the boundaries of wakefulness and unconsciousness.
Lender argues that the answer does not lie in regular brain waves but rather in the neutral activity that is often ignored: the erratic background noises.
Brain's Background Noises
Lender is only one of the growing number of neuroscientists that are looking into the idea that the brain's background noises and electrical activity could hold new clues to the inner workings of man's mind.
Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist was discouraged by the scientific community on his study on how noisy features of the brain's activity change with age.
Collaborating with various neuroscientists at Berkeley and UC San Diego, Voytek developed novel software that isolates regular oscillations hidden in the aperiodic segments of brain activity. This allows neuroscientists to dissect both regular and aperiodic activity in an effort to disentangle their roles in cognition, disease, and behavior.
Aperiodic Activity--Neuroscientists Explain
Our bodies sway with the familiar oscillation of rhythm of breaths and heartbeats which are vital cycles for survival. On the other hand, there seem to be equally vital beats in the human brain that doesn't have a specific pattern and could hold clues to the underpinnings of cognition and behavior.
When neurons send glutamate to another neuron, the receiving neuron has a high tendency to fire; this is called excitation. Likewise, if a neuron spits neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid, the recipient becomes less likely to fire; this is inhibition. Too much of either can cause seizures, sleep, and some coma.
To quantify aperiodic activity, researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to study the balance between inhibition and excitation.
Biyu J. He, an assistant professor at the University Grossman School of Medicine says, "For decades, brain activity contains the '1/f' slope has been deemed unimportant and was often removed from analyses in order to emphasize brain oscillations. However, in recent years, increasing evidence suggests that scale-free brain activity contributes actively to brain functioning."
New Signals from the Brain's Background Noise
Voytek found in his 2015 study that brains of older adults had more aperiodic activity than younger adults. Voytek and co-author Robert Knight observed that as a person's brain ages, it becomes dominated by white noise. Here they discovered a correlation between age-related memory decline and noise.
Scientists haven't fully understood what causes aperiodic signals yet. However, it is an essential support structure on the study of the human mind. Researchers hope that the mystery tip scientists on studying brain-cognition correlation from a new perspective.
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