New Form of Neural Communication

New Form of Neural Communication

Peter Dockrill

Durand and his team investigated slow periodic activity in vitro, studying the brain waves in hippocampal slices extracted from decapitated mice.

What they found was that slow periodic activity can generate electric fields which in turn activate neighbouring cells, constituting a form of neural communication without chemical synaptic transmission or gap junctions.

"We've known about these waves for a long time, but no one knows their exact function and no one believed they could spontaneously propagate," Durand says.

"I've been studying the hippocampus, itself just one small part of the brain, for 40 years and it keeps surprising me."

The team's most radical finding was that these electrical fields can activate neurons through a complete gap in severed brain tissue, when the two pieces remain in close physical proximity.

"To ensure that the slice was completely cut, the two pieces of tissue were separated and then rejoined while a clear gap was observed under the surgical microscope," the authors explain in their paper.

"The slow hippocampal periodic activity could indeed generate an event on the other side of a complete cut through the whole slice."

If you think that sounds freaky, you're not the only one. The review committee at The Journal of Physiology – in which the research has been published – insisted the experiments be completed again before agreeing to print the study.

This thread seems related:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-n...9#pid25559

Though in that case the claim (possibly mistaken?) was that the separation was "across the room" rather than "in close physical proximity", and the experiment involved rabbits rather than mice.

I'd suggest perhaps this was the same phenomenon, but rather vaguely and somewhat inaccurately reported in that older thread. Maybe.

This thread seems related:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-n...9#pid25559

Though in that case the claim (possibly mistaken?) was that the separation was "across the room" rather than "in close physical proximity", and the experiment involved rabbits rather than mice.

I'd suggest perhaps this was the same phenomenon, but rather vaguely and somewhat inaccurately reported in that older thread. Maybe.

Yes, Chris linked to an article at the end of that thread you posted, which discussed the very same paper in Sci's OP.

We should note that the researchers are only measuring electrical fields (as opposed to magnetic), and when the cut gap exceeded 400um (0.4mm) the slow periodic activity propagation across the cut ceased. So it won't get across a room directly under this experiment, but it might be different for a larger piece of brain tissue which contains a much large network (due to feedback/stochastic resonance amplification of a signal), or, both pieces of tissue might be synchronized by another compatible external source/s.

But even at 0.4mm, it's sufficient for me that this 'field' area of research continues to produce new observations. The researchers use the results of their study to show that all the previous theories put forward to explain this slow periodic activity are most likely wrong, and put forward their own new electrical field-based theory of propagation. They also show this slow electrical field activities power is concentrated around the microtubules (dendrites of the neurons) which is quite lovely.

They also show it's just normal weak endogenous fields that allow this spontaneous propagation to occur, up till now these were generally considered far too weak to play any role in the brain, and quite excitingly for me, they show the fields can be directly cancelled/modulated by an appropriate opposing field of the same weak endogenous strength.

Lots of previous research implicates this slow periodic activity as being important/related to memory, and in particular memory consolidation. Which as far as I'm concerned at this level... is what these larger structures (dendrites/dendritic spines) in the brain do... act like a note pad to pass access to information through time, and storing sensory associations. But the experiences themselves seem to be generated at some deeper informational level, below that of QM and Relativity.