American neuroscientists announced a revolutionary discovery in the field of human brain activity. Dominique Durand and colleagues at the University of Cleveland studied the slow brain rhythms that are observed in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus during sleep.
It is believed that these rhythms correlate with the consolidation of memory of events that occurred during wakefulness. There are many ways to study slow rhythms. For example, on a living brain of mice that are sleeping or under anesthesia: there these rhythms are quite natural, but it is not easy to understand their mechanisms.
Another option is to simply grow a culture of neuronal cells. Oddly enough, such neurons, which have never participated in the work of any brain, also demonstrate coordinated periodic activity, which resembles alpha rhythms during sleep (and, apparently, it is no coincidence: it is difficult to call the life of a culture of neurons on a nutrient medium wakefulness).
There is also a third option, an intermediate one: a section of the brain that has just been alive is used.
In neuroscience, such slices are called ex vivo. It was with such slices of the hippocampus of the mouse brain that the Ohio researchers worked. They also showed slow periodic activity.
The scientists noted that normal synapse signaling does not explain this activity. Apparently, the so-called "efaptic" transmission, that is, the passage of an electrical impulse through the contact between neurons, was involved in this. However, this has not yet been a big sensation: both efaps and synapse are all allowed by modern science in relation to the possible interaction of neurons.
But then the oddities began: it turned out that communication between neurons could be enhanced or suppressed by weak electric fields. The researchers then discovered a surprising phenomenon, which they described in their article on the possible interaction of neurons at a distance. This happened when they cut the tissue in such a way that a gap was formed between the two parts of the cut.
A wave of slow periodic activity in the hippocampus, reaching the incision, generated excitement in another part of it, which did not have direct contact with the opposite one.
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This means that the neurons have entered into communication with each other - that is, exchanged electrical signals - at a distance. The distance, albeit small, but the trouble is the beginning: if this happens, then, perhaps, the foil hat is not such a useless gadget.
And the main conclusion of the study is that slow rhythms - a phenomenon that has been known for almost half a century and has been involved in the most fundamental mechanisms of the brain like sleep - propagate through a completely unknown mechanism in which electric fields may be involved. “We still do not understand at all that part of our discovery, which should become the answer to the question“So what ?!”, - rightly notes the author Dominique Durand.
