Relationships between short and fast brain timescales

Abstract

Brain electric activity exhibits two important features: oscillations with different timescales, characterized by diverse functional and psychological outcomes, and a temporal power law distribution. In order to further investigate the relationships between low- and high- frequency spikes in the brain, we used a variant of the Borsuk-Ulam theorem which states that, when we assess the nervous activity as embedded in a sphere equipped with a fractal dimension, we achieve two antipodal points with similar features (the slow and fast, scale-free oscillations). We demonstrate that slow and fast nervous oscillations mirror each other over time via a sinusoid relationship and provide, through the Bloch theorem from solid-state physics, the possible equation which links the two timescale activities. We show that, based on topological findings, nervous activities occurring in micro-levels are projected to single activities at meso- and macro-levels. This means that brain functions assessed at the higher scale of the whole brain necessarily display a counterpart in the lower ones, and vice versa. Our topological approach makes it possible to assess brain functions both based on entropy, and in the general terms of particle trajectories taking place on donut-like manifolds. Condensed brain activities might give rise to ideas and concepts by combination of different functional and anatomical levels. Furthermore, cognitive phenomena, as well as social activity can be described by the laws of quantum mechanics; memories and decisions exhibit holographic organization. In physics, the term duality refers to a case where two seemingly different systems turn out to be equivalent. This topological duality holds for all the types of spatio-temporal brain activities, independent of their inter- and intra-level relationships, strength, magnitude and boundaries, allowing us to connect the physiological manifestations of consciousness to the electric activities of the brain.

Cortical temporal hierarchy is immature in middle childhood

“…Temporal hierarchy in the cortex is organized from short to long temporal receptive windows (TRWs) (Hasson et al 2008), which is also thought to reflect a region's location along a unimodal to transmodal gradient, respectively (Margulies et al 2016, Huntenburg et al 2018. Longer timescale processing may reflect recurrent connections between higher-order association cortices (e.g., DMN) that enable the ability to integrate newly arriving information while also maintaining an internal working model of one's environment and cognitive state , Chaudhuri et al 2015, Déli et al 2017. Given the immaturity of the DMN during middle childhood (Fair et al 2009, Supekar et al 2010, de Bie et al 2012, Muetzel et al 2016, perhaps the development of long timescale processing reflects the refinement of these cortical gradients; however the current study cannot address these hypotheses.…”

“…Further, theory of mind is a complex ability that involves the coordination of multiple skills (e.g., face recognition, emotion processing, predicting behavior) (Schaafsma et al 2015), many of which operate on diverse timescales. Thus, longer timescales may be needed to track, accumulate, and refine an accurate representation of mental states (Déli et al 2017), which is essential to one's ability to predict the social environment (Koster-Hale and Saxe 2013). While we found that long timescales were important for children's social-cognitive comprehension, the current study used a coarse temporal resolution (intact and scrambled).…”

The Energy Coding of a Structural Neural Network Based on the Hodgkin–Huxley Model

“…(2) The neural energy can be combined with spiking pattern of membrane potentials to resolve the neural information (Wang et al, 2006 , 2008 , 2016 , 2017 ; Wang and Wang, 2014 ; Wang R. et al, 2014 ; Wang Z. et al, 2014 ; Kozma, 2016 ; Yan et al, 2016 ; Zheng et al, 2016 ). (3) Neural energy can describe the interaction of large-scale neurons referring to the interaction of multiple brain regions that cannot be achieved by any conventional coding theory (Wang et al, 2009 ; Vuksanović and Hövel, 2016 ; Zhang et al, 2016 ; Déli et al, 2017 ; Peters et al, 2017 ). (4) Currently, a simultaneous recording from multiple brain regions in traumatic brain injury experiments is challenging.…”

Spontaneous electromagnetic induction promotes the formation of economical neuronal network structure via self-organization process

“…However, the neuronal electric activities generated by the transmembrane flow of ions not only modulate the synaptic connection but also inevitably produce a time-varying electric field as well as a magnetic field, according to Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic induction 34–36 . This spontaneous magnetic field around neurons may be the foundation of brain transferring sensory stimulus via complex electromagnetic flows to the cortex 37 and has significant effects on the dynamical properties of neurons and neuronal networks 34,38–41 ; for example, it induces multiple firing modes of neurons 42,43 , promotes the double coherence resonance, inhibits the stochastic resonance 40 and modulates spatiotemporal patterns 44 . Meanwhile, magnetic field interactions between neurons support a potential spatial channel for neural information transmission 45,46 and can significantly modulate signal communications between neurons 45,47 , induce firing synchronization 48,49 , trigger complex mode transitions of electrical activities 50–53 , and even offset the effect of a blocked potassium ion channel on the collective dynamics 54 .…”