G. Bard Ermentrout, Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, working with a team led by University of Chicago, has shown distinct patterns in waves of brain activity carry information when forming and recalling memories.
These waves form different shapes — spirals or concentric waves, for instance — and move in different directions based on what a person is doing. They vary from person to person and according to task, show up as short but stable bursts of neural activity and flexibly change their shape for encoding different types of behavior, such as memory encoding and retrieval.
Researchers have known that there are waves of activity in the brain, “but here we were able to show that there are actually different spatial patterns in these waves,” said senior author Joshua Jacobs, a professor of neurology at the University of Chicago and senior author of the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.
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