When you navigate space, it turns out that human brains create eerily-like spatial sense brain waves. Scientists have discovered this after devising a way to scan our brains during free movements, instead of lying still in a scanner.
“Our results mean our brains are creating a universal signature to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes,” explained neurosurgeon Nanthia Suthana of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Previous studies in rats have shown that low-frequency brain waves help rats to monitor their position when exploring a new space – by defining the boundaries of space. Boundary-like waves were also identified in humans, but only when navigating a virtual environment while still waiting for brain scans.
“We wanted to explore this idea in humans – and test whether they could track others who were close to them – but hindered by existing technology,” said Matthias Stangl from UCLA.
So Stangl and colleagues created a portable brain scanner, made up of a backpack with a computer that connects wirelessly to electrons inserted into the brain (a system called intracranial electroencephalography) to help them. by studying how our brains shape and remind us of spatial memories.
The wireless recording device. (Suthana Laboratory / UCLA)
Their subjects were five epilepsy patients who already had electrodes inserted into the brain to control their seizures. These implants lie in the medial-temporal lobe – our brains are thought to encode long-term, deliberate memories, and spatial knowledge.
Participants participated in a 15-minute navigation activity where they were asked to find the locations of the hidden targets and learn within a room. This was followed by a 15-minute observation activity where their participants had to keep an eye on someone else navigating the room, and push a button as the other person crossed the spaces. unmarked target.
The researchers found that as participants approached a physical boundary – such as a room wall – the flow of low-frequency oscillations in their brain increased in power. The same thing happened when they watched someone else approach the walls.
“We found that oscillatory changes were associated with very similar boundaries between actions that required self-direction versus observing another person,” they wrote in their paper.
Recent studies in rats and bats have found the same group of hippocampal neurons code for both the place of the animal itself and the location of other parts of the species.
The power of these brain wave representations of space increased, shown below, as participants focused on finding their target location. The oscillation signals were not continuous, and did not change the rate at which they occurred, just the strength.
(Suthana Laboratory / UCLA)
Above: Brain visual strength map of the chamber boundaries with red representing increased power in brainwave signals.
“Our results support the notion that, under certain states of mind, this pattern of brain waves may help us identify boundaries,” Stangl said. “In this case, it was when people were aiming and hunting for something.”
The electrical activity is measured oscillating within a frequency range called theta waves. We usually emit these slow but noisy waves as they sail, so it is not surprising that they are noticeable in such action.
Interestingly, gamma waves appeared slightly more vivid in similar patterns, with slightly more differences between different scenarios. These are the waves we make when we use more of our brains to think, drawing experiences into our working memory.
The team believes that the brain movements they observed are generated by several groups of neurons that may be cells that encode specifically for boundaries, objects, and other boundaries and objective items. A better understanding of this neuronal language may help us solve brain problems.
And, in an interesting development, they have given their backpack design to other researchers. Soon, we can expect to learn even more about our brain patterns in complex social situations.
Their research was published in Nature.