8 ms·

Evidence that the brain’s ability to control thinking relies on beta rhythms

240 points by el_duderino 9y ago

randomdrake 9y ago
Study: Gamma and beta bursts during working memory readout suggest roles in its volitional control Citation: Mikael Lundqvist, Pawel Herman, Melissa R. Warden, Scott L. Brincat & Earl K. Miller. Nature Communications 9, Article number: 394 (2018). Link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02791-8 https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02791-8 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02791-8 Abstract: Working memory (WM) activity is not as stationary or sustained as previously thought. There are brief bursts of gamma (~50–120 Hz) and beta (~20–35 Hz) oscillations, the former linked to stimulus information in spiking. We examined these dynamics in relation to readout and control mechanisms of WM. Monkeys held sequences of two objects in WM to match to subsequent sequences. Changes in beta and gamma bursting suggested their distinct roles. In anticipation of having to use an object for the match decision, there was an increase in gamma and spiking information about that object and reduced beta bursting. This readout signal was only seen before relevant test objects, and was related to premotor activity. When the objects were no longer needed, beta increased and gamma decreased together with object spiking information. Deviations from these dynamics predicted behavioral errors. Thus, beta could regulate gamma and the information in WM.
- tomalpha 9y ago
  I can’t tell from this, but does this demonstrate a causal link or is the headline somewhat disconnected from the paper? That is to say, does the brain truly rely on beta rhythms, or are they just a symptom of something else?
  - maxander 9y ago
    I think the answer is necessarily "no," because the rhythm is a sign we observe of some functional system in the brain, not the functional system itself. Similar to how your heart rate is just a sign of the beating of your heart, only the latter of which is a real functional mechanism. Something is happening in the brain that generates these patterns and which also has to do with the cognitive faculties described in the paper; I don't think anyone has a very clear idea what that mechanism is, though. I'm not sure if this answers your question, or is just pedantry. :)
    - tomalpha 9y ago
      Thanks. That sort of answers my question. I think that means that I disagree with the headline because this research doesn’t demonstrate evidence of the brain relying on beta rhythms to control thinking. (From my strictly lay reading).
    - anon1253 9y ago
      The waves come from synchronicity of neurons "firing". When neurons fire there is a flow of ions that causes a potential difference. If a lot of this happens at the same time with some periodicity you can measure this. But it would be like looking at a CPU running some math operations and determining "there is periodic activity in the ALU" (which could be due to memory reads). Now this is a poor analogy because a single neuron doesn't do "one thing" it's massively distributed. My go to argumentation for "how the brain works" (and thus consciousness) has been that it's a massive coincidence detector that tries to encode these coincidences in spike train activity using spike train dependent plasticity. In doing so the brain echoes the coincidences of the neural (sensory) input, and since these encode for some "real" cause-effect you can predict the future: memory is "echoing" in a neural substrate, consciousness is exploiting those "echos" to try to predict the future. I wrote it up in 2011 https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?d... I've never seen anyone poke holes in this, and even hints at the details of this paper. Guess I chose the wrong career somewhere.
  - growlix 9y ago
    The study's design cannot address causality. They report a correlation between beta rhythms and the subjects' behavior. It's unclear whether local field potentials (LFPs), of which "beta rhythms" are one specific frequency band (approximately 12-30hz), are actually a mechanism that the brain uses to transmit information. Information is known to be transmitted via the discharges of single neurons; LFPs represent the aggregate activity of tens of thousands of neurons within ~3mm of a recording electrode. It's possible that these aggregate voltage fluctuations feed back onto the activity of single neurons [0], but LFPs are generally considered an emergent property of populations of neurons as opposed to an information transmission mechanism in their own right. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2727 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2727
- uhhyeahdude 9y ago
  Thank you for providing useful, concise, and well-formatted study citations. I'm not in academia as of this year, and it pains me to see this information omitted from posts that would greatly benifit from this. I'll do a better job at including relevant cites in my own submissions.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hawktheslayer 9y ago
I just finished reading Wait But Why's excellent article on NeuralLink https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html I wonder if these top-down beta rythmes would force out implanted data similar to white blood cells and viruses.
tw1010 9y ago
Is there any data about the tendency towards of beta rhythms vs not in different cultures around the world?
- andai 9y ago
  Since brainwaves are associated with brain disorders and brain disorders are associated with genetics, it would be worth (albeit dangerous politically?) to investigate the link between brainwaves (and by extension, different cognitive faculties) and ethnicity.
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    This assumes that brainwaves function the same in everybody and that their measurement means anything more than phrenology.
    - growlix 9y ago
      Also that "brainwaves" have meaning beyond the behavior, brain region, and context in which they're being examined.
    - ipsum2 9y ago
      Do you base this claim off of any scientific evidence? Measuring schizophrenia based off of gamma oscillations is standard clinical practice. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27732692 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27732692 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16571550 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16571550 https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201617.pdf?origin=ppub https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201617.pdf?origin=ppub
      - jnordwick 9y ago
        I didn't mean to imply they were totally useless just that too much might be read into them. I guess i did use a bad comparison.
syswsi 9y ago
If anyone here is interested in learning more about Neurotechnology, I co-founded an organization called NeuroTechX which brings together neurotechnology enthusiasts from across the world. You can find out more about us at http://neurotechx.com/ http://neurotechx.com/
jnordwick 9y ago
It seems almost definitional that this effect is correlative and not causative unless the authors are positing that there are structures in the brain whose purpose is to generate brain waves or that we just massively misunderstand the function of neurons. I read the previous paper summary linked to and I didn't see a way these waves are supposed to affect the neurons. Is there absolutely any theory as to the mechanism? Seems like bad science and reasoning even if the topic is interesting.
- tomalpha 9y ago
  This was my reading of the paper/summary too - a demonstration of correlation but not the evidence of a causal link that the headline suggests. My understanding of neuroscience is limited however. Can someone with a better understanding point me at what I’m missing?
  - growlix 9y ago
    Your comprehension seems spot on to me, though maybe you feel like you're missing something given the apparent discrepancy between the hype vs. value of this research. I think there are two relevant factors here: 1) MIT is very good at publicity and press. 2) Causal neuroscience experiments are still technically challenging to implement in complex behaving organisms (e.g. monkeys and humans). We have methods such as microstimulation (invasive) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (non-invasive), but these methods are pretty ham-fisted. They indiscriminately activate (or deactivate) all the neurons in and passing through a given volume in the brain (optogenetics is promising in this regard, but it's still a nascent technology in monkeys). So while this study may appear weak because it's correlational, it may actually represent a meaningful step forward in the field.
    - tomalpha 9y ago
      Thank you. That’s pretty much spot on for my thought process and interesting, possibly even positive for the future. At least I’m not going crazy. Or if I am, I’m not alone :)
    - 9y ago
Shank 9y ago
I wonder how much this can be applied to day to day life. For example, the Binaural app on the iOS app store acts as a wave generator that lets you listen to specific frequencies. I'd be interested to see if you could force yourself into getting beta wave activity in the brain by just listening to beta frequencies -- almost as if to tune yourself manually.
- wolco 9y ago
  I would love to see someone reply with personal experience. I have tried similiar apps for extremely brief periods and could feel a change.
  - mostlyskeptical 9y ago
    The placebo effect is still an effect.
    - RBerenguel 9y ago
      Yup. I use this app sparingly, and I feel a mild effect. And actually I don’t care if it’s placebo (likely) or not, since it kind of works as I want
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    Personal experience is the bane of science. And plural of “anectode” is “anectodes”, not “data”. Having worked in the field for years, I am pretty sure that listening to some sound at some frequency might induce that rhythm in the appropriate part of the brain (I have worked on SSVEP which is the same thing for visual stimuli, and is easily detectable, there is also some evidence that it could work for sensory motor stimuli). However, inducing some frequency somewhere in the brain is pretty useless. Beta activity has been known for some time as the “activity” indicator. But this is simply because that is the working frequency of the brain. Active means just that, is it good is it bad? That depends. One thing that strikes me in the field is how sure people are that anything “induced” in the brain will be positive. If the binaural beats thing really worked, then you would have as much chance to create depression as a sense of calmness.
21 9y ago
> There are millions of neurons in the brain Why would they use a different order of magnitude. Surely they know that there are billions of them (100 bil in fact).
digikata 9y ago
Radiolab had an interesting episode on the gamma frequency, possibly stimulated by light or sound and a possible relation to Alzheimers. https://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma-back/ https://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma-back/ Makes one wonder about the effects of raves.

240 points by el_duderino 9y ago

Study: Gamma and beta bursts during working memory readout suggest roles in its volitional control Citation: Mikael Lundqvist, Pawel Herman, Melissa R. Warden, Scott L. Brincat & Earl K. Miller. Nature Communications 9, Article number: 394 (2018). Link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02791-8 https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02791-8 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02791-8 Abstract: Working memory (WM) activity is not as stationary or sustained as previously thought. There are brief bursts of gamma (~50–120 Hz) and beta (~20–35 Hz) oscillations, the former linked to stimulus information in spiking. We examined these dynamics in relation to readout and control mechanisms of WM. Monkeys held sequences of two objects in WM to match to subsequent sequences. Changes in beta and gamma bursting suggested their distinct roles. In anticipation of having to use an object for the match decision, there was an increase in gamma and spiking information about that object and reduced beta bursting. This readout signal was only seen before relevant test objects, and was related to premotor activity. When the objects were no longer needed, beta increased and gamma decreased together with object spiking information. Deviations from these dynamics predicted behavioral errors. Thus, beta could regulate gamma and the information in WM.

tomalpha 9y ago
I can’t tell from this, but does this demonstrate a causal link or is the headline somewhat disconnected from the paper? That is to say, does the brain truly rely on beta rhythms, or are they just a symptom of something else?
- maxander 9y ago
  I think the answer is necessarily "no," because the rhythm is a sign we observe of some functional system in the brain, not the functional system itself. Similar to how your heart rate is just a sign of the beating of your heart, only the latter of which is a real functional mechanism. Something is happening in the brain that generates these patterns and which also has to do with the cognitive faculties described in the paper; I don't think anyone has a very clear idea what that mechanism is, though. I'm not sure if this answers your question, or is just pedantry. :)
  - tomalpha 9y ago
    Thanks. That sort of answers my question. I think that means that I disagree with the headline because this research doesn’t demonstrate evidence of the brain relying on beta rhythms to control thinking. (From my strictly lay reading).
  - anon1253 9y ago
    The waves come from synchronicity of neurons "firing". When neurons fire there is a flow of ions that causes a potential difference. If a lot of this happens at the same time with some periodicity you can measure this. But it would be like looking at a CPU running some math operations and determining "there is periodic activity in the ALU" (which could be due to memory reads). Now this is a poor analogy because a single neuron doesn't do "one thing" it's massively distributed. My go to argumentation for "how the brain works" (and thus consciousness) has been that it's a massive coincidence detector that tries to encode these coincidences in spike train activity using spike train dependent plasticity. In doing so the brain echoes the coincidences of the neural (sensory) input, and since these encode for some "real" cause-effect you can predict the future: memory is "echoing" in a neural substrate, consciousness is exploiting those "echos" to try to predict the future. I wrote it up in 2011 https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?d... I've never seen anyone poke holes in this, and even hints at the details of this paper. Guess I chose the wrong career somewhere.
- growlix 9y ago
  The study's design cannot address causality. They report a correlation between beta rhythms and the subjects' behavior. It's unclear whether local field potentials (LFPs), of which "beta rhythms" are one specific frequency band (approximately 12-30hz), are actually a mechanism that the brain uses to transmit information. Information is known to be transmitted via the discharges of single neurons; LFPs represent the aggregate activity of tens of thousands of neurons within ~3mm of a recording electrode. It's possible that these aggregate voltage fluctuations feed back onto the activity of single neurons [0], but LFPs are generally considered an emergent property of populations of neurons as opposed to an information transmission mechanism in their own right. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2727 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2727
uhhyeahdude 9y ago
Thank you for providing useful, concise, and well-formatted study citations. I'm not in academia as of this year, and it pains me to see this information omitted from posts that would greatly benifit from this. I'll do a better job at including relevant cites in my own submissions.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hawktheslayer 9y ago

I just finished reading Wait But Why's excellent article on NeuralLink https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html I wonder if these top-down beta rythmes would force out implanted data similar to white blood cells and viruses.

tw1010 9y ago

Is there any data about the tendency towards of beta rhythms vs not in different cultures around the world?

andai 9y ago
Since brainwaves are associated with brain disorders and brain disorders are associated with genetics, it would be worth (albeit dangerous politically?) to investigate the link between brainwaves (and by extension, different cognitive faculties) and ethnicity.
- jnordwick 9y ago
  This assumes that brainwaves function the same in everybody and that their measurement means anything more than phrenology.
  - growlix 9y ago
    Also that "brainwaves" have meaning beyond the behavior, brain region, and context in which they're being examined.
  - ipsum2 9y ago
    Do you base this claim off of any scientific evidence? Measuring schizophrenia based off of gamma oscillations is standard clinical practice. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27732692 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27732692 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16571550 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16571550 https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201617.pdf?origin=ppub https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201617.pdf?origin=ppub
    - jnordwick 9y ago
      I didn't mean to imply they were totally useless just that too much might be read into them. I guess i did use a bad comparison.

syswsi 9y ago

If anyone here is interested in learning more about Neurotechnology, I co-founded an organization called NeuroTechX which brings together neurotechnology enthusiasts from across the world. You can find out more about us at http://neurotechx.com/ http://neurotechx.com/

jnordwick 9y ago

It seems almost definitional that this effect is correlative and not causative unless the authors are positing that there are structures in the brain whose purpose is to generate brain waves or that we just massively misunderstand the function of neurons. I read the previous paper summary linked to and I didn't see a way these waves are supposed to affect the neurons. Is there absolutely any theory as to the mechanism? Seems like bad science and reasoning even if the topic is interesting.

tomalpha 9y ago
This was my reading of the paper/summary too - a demonstration of correlation but not the evidence of a causal link that the headline suggests. My understanding of neuroscience is limited however. Can someone with a better understanding point me at what I’m missing?
- growlix 9y ago
  Your comprehension seems spot on to me, though maybe you feel like you're missing something given the apparent discrepancy between the hype vs. value of this research. I think there are two relevant factors here: 1) MIT is very good at publicity and press. 2) Causal neuroscience experiments are still technically challenging to implement in complex behaving organisms (e.g. monkeys and humans). We have methods such as microstimulation (invasive) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (non-invasive), but these methods are pretty ham-fisted. They indiscriminately activate (or deactivate) all the neurons in and passing through a given volume in the brain (optogenetics is promising in this regard, but it's still a nascent technology in monkeys). So while this study may appear weak because it's correlational, it may actually represent a meaningful step forward in the field.
  - tomalpha 9y ago
    Thank you. That’s pretty much spot on for my thought process and interesting, possibly even positive for the future. At least I’m not going crazy. Or if I am, I’m not alone :)
  - 9y ago

Shank 9y ago

I wonder how much this can be applied to day to day life. For example, the Binaural app on the iOS app store acts as a wave generator that lets you listen to specific frequencies. I'd be interested to see if you could force yourself into getting beta wave activity in the brain by just listening to beta frequencies -- almost as if to tune yourself manually.

wolco 9y ago
I would love to see someone reply with personal experience. I have tried similiar apps for extremely brief periods and could feel a change.
- mostlyskeptical 9y ago
  The placebo effect is still an effect.
  - RBerenguel 9y ago
    Yup. I use this app sparingly, and I feel a mild effect. And actually I don’t care if it’s placebo (likely) or not, since it kind of works as I want
- yoz-y 9y ago
  Personal experience is the bane of science. And plural of “anectode” is “anectodes”, not “data”. Having worked in the field for years, I am pretty sure that listening to some sound at some frequency might induce that rhythm in the appropriate part of the brain (I have worked on SSVEP which is the same thing for visual stimuli, and is easily detectable, there is also some evidence that it could work for sensory motor stimuli). However, inducing some frequency somewhere in the brain is pretty useless. Beta activity has been known for some time as the “activity” indicator. But this is simply because that is the working frequency of the brain. Active means just that, is it good is it bad? That depends. One thing that strikes me in the field is how sure people are that anything “induced” in the brain will be positive. If the binaural beats thing really worked, then you would have as much chance to create depression as a sense of calmness.

21 9y ago

> There are millions of neurons in the brain Why would they use a different order of magnitude. Surely they know that there are billions of them (100 bil in fact).

digikata 9y ago

Radiolab had an interesting episode on the gamma frequency, possibly stimulated by light or sound and a possible relation to Alzheimers. https://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma-back/ https://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma-back/ Makes one wonder about the effects of raves.