A team of Brazilian physicists working with neuroscientists studying freely behaving rats have found that their neurons often act in precise coordination over time, in a study about to be published in EPJ B. These findings stem from the work of Bruno Silva, a researcher at Bahia Federal University in Salvador, and his colleagues from other universities in the Northeastern region of Brazil, and suggest that neuronal networks' memory could be explored in the future.
Because neurons are connected with each other, acting as operational units in the brain, they can be considered as a complex system. The authors thus relied on a theory traditionally used to study complex networks to confirm whether the firing frequency of a given neuron is correlated with that of other brain areas.
Silva and his colleagues constructed a model in which a network node represents a neuron and a network link is included between a pair of nodes whenever their firing rates are correlated. Instead of focusing on few large networks with thousands of nodes as studied by techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging, the authors prepared detailed statistics on the records of a large set (~10,000) of smaller networks.
They found that, irrespective of the behavioral state of the animal , the number of networks with highly correlated activity in distinct brain areas can be represented in a fat-tailed graph representing a widespread probability of such correlation happening. This suggests that such connectivity associated with a specific function of the brain persists over time. Thus, memories in neuronal functional networks could very well be investigated in the future.
Finally, the authors also realised that what remains nearly constant in the brain is not the actual function of individual neurons but aspects of the network structure itself.
###
B. B. M. Silva, J. G. V. Miranda, G.Corso, M. Copelli, N. Vasconcelos, S. Ribeiro, R. F. S. Andrade (2012), Statistical characterization of an ensemble of functional neural networks, European Physical Journal B 85: 358, DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2012-30481-7
Springer: http://www.springer.com
Thanks to Springer for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
This press release has been viewed 387 time(s).
 |
 |
|
|
New study reveals participants unconsciously sniff their right hand after shaking it with others as part of process to pick up chemical signals about others
If you have ever struggled through a math class, you may not think of numbers as natural.
DNA analysis has revealed evidence for a massive migration into the heartland of Europe 4,500 years ago.
In the days before Amazon and TripAdvisor, how could you express your consumer outrage? For ancient Mesopotamians, it was seethe, stamp and bake
Alzheimer's researchers at Harvard for the first time are scanning the brains of healthy patients for the presence of a hallmark protein called tau, which forms toxic tangles of nerve fibers associated with the fatal disease.
Evidence of an ancient settlement was found in the most inaccessible forest in Central America
Sorry mom
Strong drugs are rarely warranted to control the behavior of dementia patients, specialists say. But antipsychotic medicine is being overprescribed, and not just among residents of nursing homes.
Scientists are refining what constitutes "normal"
Bumblebees can recall which flowers yield nectar, but like people they can get mixed up – leading them to home in on flowers they have no experience of
 |
 |