Nicoletta Lanese is the health channel editor at Live Science and was previously a news editor and staff writer at the site. She holds a graduate certificate in science communication from UC Santa Cruz and degrees in neuroscience and dance from the University of Florida.
Scientists have discovered a universal pattern of brain waves in multiple primate species, including humans.
The slower brain waves in deeper portions of the cortex act as gatekeepers, dictating which bits of information enter and remain in conscious thought, said senior study author André Bastos, an assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. The fast waves, which reflect those conscious thoughts, are called gamma rhythms and range between 50 and 150 hertz. The slow waves, meanwhile, are called alpha-beta rhythms and run about 10 to 30 hertz.
Scientists across four institutions — Vanderbilt, MIT, the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and the University of Western Ontario in Canada — collaborated to gather this trove of brain data from monkeys and people. They used devices called multicontact laminar probes to record activity from all the layers of the cortex at once.
In this way, they uncovered a universal pattern of brain activity that shows up throughout the cortex and between species. This pattern is marked by peak gamma activity in layers 2 and 3 of the cortex, closer to the skull, and peak alpha-beta activity in layers 5 and 6, closer to subcortical regions of the brain. There's also a point of crossover in layer 4.
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