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It could be very informative to observe the pixels on your phone under a microscope, but not if your goal is to understand what a whole video on the screen shows. Cognition is much the same kind of emergent property in the brain. It can only be under
MIT Picower Institute neuroscientists lay out a framework for understanding how thought arises from the coordination of neural activity driven by oscillating electric fields — also known as brain “waves” or “rhythms.”
Thought emerges and is controlled in the brain via the rhythmically and spatially coordinated activity of millions of neurons, scientists argue in a new article.
May 12, 2021MIT In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brain’s normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels, waking the brain back up and restoring arousal. “There’s a folk psycholo...