Has a thought suddenly flashed through your mind, seemingly out of nowhere?
It just might be your brain storing to the hard drive: foundation grantees at the California Institute of Technology are looking inside brain cells to study intense bursts of neural activity called "ripples", which are thought to underlie memory formation.
Ripples occur when a small fraction of brain cells, or neurons, fire synchronously in a specific area in the brain's hippocampus thought to be an important relay station for memories.
The Caltech team used fine glass pipettes with tips thinner than a tenth of the width of a human hair to measure directly the voltage difference across the cellular membrane of individual neurons in awake mice. By using this measurement technique, they could monitor the activity inside a single neuron.
"By coordinating their activities, the[se] neurons are maximizing the impact of their output on downstream areas of the brain. The overall effect is more powerful than if each neuron fired independently," says study coauthor and Caltech research scientist Evgueniy Lubenov. "It is the difference between clapping independently or in unison with others at a concert. The effect in the latter case is stronger, even with the same number of people applauding."
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