Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Slow brain waves play key roles in coordinating complex activity ... and yet it remains a mystery how widely separated regions of the cortex involving billions of cells are linked together to coordinate complex activity.

University of California - Berkeley researchers observed the interaction of brain waves during simple tasks, such as face recognition and hand movements to learn how areas across the brain communicate.  They found that basic activities like responding to questions activates areas all over the brain that hear sound, process it, sift information, create a response, and control movement of your mouth to speak.

By measuring electrical activity in the brains of pre-surgical epilepsy patients, researchers discovered that slower theta waves, tune-in faster high-gamma waves to transmit information between different areas of the brain. In this way, it appears that areas such as the frontal cortex, separated by several inches in the cerebral cortex, can coordinate activity.

Researchers predict that the brain is organized by hierarchy of brain waves that control how one neuron communicates to another neuron and they are testing the idea that the high-frequency oscillations generated by the brain are coupled to the slower theta oscillations.

They predict that brain waves organize neurons into collaborative groups: slower waves synchronize the firing of large groups of neurons, while faster waves synchronize smaller groups. Still unsure what underlying neural activity generates the waves recorded on the surface of the cortex, the waves may be generated spontaneously as neurons group together in hundreds of thousands.

A recent shift in how researchers map brain function suggests it's more about neuron groups that cooperate on one task, and then move to cooperate on another task, than that specific locations of the brain take care of specific tasks. Check back for more on this study of brain wave interaction inside your brain - an important consideration for those who value the high-performance mind.... What do you think?