New BME lab video is going to show how the brain memorizes words! 27 July 2019 – Posted in: news – Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Theodore Thayib joined our BME lab as a summer undergrad student to help us with a challenging task to visualize brain activity collected from over 150 patients remembering lists of words. Theo’s skills and talents in computer sciences, which he studies as major at the Iowa State University, enabled us to follow the brain waves that underlie thinking and memorizing words across multiple dimensions of the 3D brain anatomy, time of word presentation, and six different frequency bands of slow and fast EEG rhythms.

Results of this project are astonishing… Theo visualized over 15 000 electrodes implanted in brains of these patients by coloring them either in warm colors, when a particular brain rhythm like the alpha activity increased, or cool colors when it decreased. The big picture was a little overwhelming at first but after careful observation and analysis of the myriad of activities happening at specific moments of viewing the words clear patterns began to emerge. We noticed new dynamic interplay between the slow and the fast rhythms, which only became evident when plotting all of the bands together. These were found to start hundreds of milliseconds before and continue for hundreds of milliseconds after word presentation. Theo himself discovered a new pattern of activity having no previous experience of analyzing brain signals! Would you notice something interesting yourself?
The video is going to be posted to watch on youtube after the upcoming Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Chicago. It will be published as a part of peer-reviewed journal articles of our PhD students Tory Marks and Cagdas Topcu and will be available online on our BME lab website. It is designed to be very visual and easy to follow for the purposes of public outreach and promotion of neuroscience. We are looking forward to your comments!