COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A mathematics researcher at Ohio State University and his colleagues have discovered two new patterns of electrochemical activity among brain cells.
The work, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal Science, may one day help explain the changes that occur in the brain during normal sleep and reveal the causes of nervous system disorders such as epilepsy.
David Terman, professor of mathematics at Ohio State, and his collaborators developed mathematical equations that describe the patterns with which electrochemical signals bounce back and forth among neurons. They modeled the signals on computer and discovered two patterns that may help advance a new view of how the brain works.
“Traditionally people thought of brain cells as switching either on or off, but that’s much too simple to account for everything brain cells do,” said Terman. “They really have lives of their own.”
Terman continued: “A common way to think about neurons is that one cell fires off a signal that excites its neighbors, and the neighbors fire off a signal and so on, in synchrony with each other, but real communication is more complex than that. One of the questions we’re confronting is how the brain produces smooth, synchronous wave patterns when the cells sometimes fire in an asynchronous way.”
The researchers looked at inhibitory signaling -- when neurons communicate by chemically suppressing activity in other cells and then releasing it. The cells bounce back after they are released and pass the signal along by suppressing other cells. Scientists observed inhibitory signaling among brain cells in the past, but assumed it couldn’t produce the smooth waves that mark synchronous brain activities such as sleep.
“We thought an inhibitory signal would produce a lurching wave,
one that wasn’t very smooth. But we discovered that it can produce
a very sm
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Contact: David Terman
Terman.1@osu.edu
(614) 292-5285
Ohio State University
26-Mar-1998