Biomedical Engineers Find Neural Activity During Rest is Highly Organized in Mice

upstart writes:

Biomedical engineers find neural activity during rest is highly organized:

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - When mice rest, individual neurons fire in seconds-long, coordinated cascades, triggering activity across the brain, according to research from Penn State and the National Institutes of Health. Previously, this was thought to be a relatively random process - single neurons firing spontaneously at random times without external stimulations.

The finding, published Nov. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was made in rodents, but may have implications for better understanding neural activity in humans - especially in elucidating cognitive decline, according to first author Xiao Liu, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and faculty co-hire in the Institute of Computational and Data Sciences.

During rest, the brain appears to restore itself: the hippocampus consolidates memories, while cerebrospinal fluid washes through neural tissue, refreshing the mind. The mechanisms of the apparent tidying and cleaning are not well understood, however.

Single neurons fire in a highly organized manner as seconds-long cascade events in the resting state," Liu said. It's not random noise. We expected to find neurons firing with some organization during the resting state, but we didn't expect such a highly organized pattern of activity with the involvement of so many neurons."

The researchers analyzed a public dataset collected by the Allen Institute. Allen Institute scientists recorded neuronal spikes" - electrical impulses to transmit information across the brain - of hundreds of neurons in resting and active rodents. They also measured pupil changes and body movements. Overall, Penn State researchers focused their analyses on the individual dynamics of about 10,000 neurons from 44 different brain regions in 14 rodents.

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