Neuroscientists have only described the passing of electrical signals through the brain via direct connections like synaptic transmission or diffusion processes. However, a groundbreaking new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has found the brain can also send signals via electrical field.
The study team said their find might lead to determining potential new targets to examine brain waves linked with memory and epilepsy as well as to better comprehend good brain physiology.
They documented neural spikes moving at a speed too slow for recognized mechanisms to flow throughout the brain. The only possibility, the researchers said, is that the wave is propagated by a mild electrical field they could recognize. Computer modeling and in-vitro experiments supported their theory, according to the team’s report.
“Researchers have thought that the brain’s endogenous electrical fields are too weak to propagate wave transmission,” study author Dominique Durand, from Case Western University, said in a statement. “But it appears the brain may be using the fields to communicate without synaptic transmissions, gap junctions, or diffusion.”
“Others have been working on such phenomena for decades, but no one has ever made these connections,” Steven J. Schiff, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at Penn State University, commented on the study. “The implications are that such directed fields can be used to modulate both pathological activities, such as seizures, and to interact with cognitive rhythms that help regulate a variety of processes in the brain.”
How these fields may work
Using mouse hippocampi, the study team found that the electrical field switches on its immediate neighbors, which, subsequently, trigger more immediate neighbors, and so on over the brain at a pace of around 0.1 meter per second.
Obstructing the endogenous electrical field in the mouse hippocampus and growing the distance between cells in a computer simulation both slowed the pace of the wave.
Since sleep waves and theta waves—which are connected with developing memories during sleep—and epileptic seizure waves move at approximately 1 meter per second, the scientists are now looking into if the electrical fields are a part of normal physiology and play a role in epilepsy. If that’s the case, they will attempt to discern what information the fields might be transporting. The study team is also looking into where the endogenous spikes originate from in the brain.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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