TASS, March 6. Russian neurophysiologists and mathematicians have developed a new approach to analyzing brain activity, within which scientists have suggested focusing the scientific community's attention on waves of activity running through the brain's crust during its work. This was reported by the press service of AIRI Institute of Artificial Intelligence.
"Our goal was to create a mathematical approach with strict requirements and conditions that will allow to expand the existing scientific picture of the world. The methods we offer will be useful for scientists in the development of neurocomputer interfaces and in the study of brain stimulation," said Ekaterina Kuzmina, a junior researcher of the AIRI Institute, whose words are quoted by the press service of the organization.
According to scientists, their approach is an alternative to two commonly accepted theories describing brain activity in limb movements. Supporters of the first of these ideas, the so-called representative approach, believe that each individual cortex neuron is responsible for its parameter of limb movement: acceleration, speed, and direction of hand movement, its angle, and other characteristics.
Many predictions of this theory have been successfully tested and proven in experiments with brain-computer interfaces, but it does not reflect all aspects of brain functioning, leading to the creation of a competitive model, the so-called dynamic approach. Its supporters suggest taking into account the overall dynamics rather than the work of single neurons when analyzing brain activity. It reflects the cyclic changes in the work of neurons, which occur in principle, which scientists call "rotational dynamics".
Five years ago, Russian neurophysiologists and their colleagues from the United States, Brazil, and Europe discovered evidence that this theory does not describe all processes occurring in the cerebral cortex in arbitrary limb movements and other forms of activity. This led them to study in detail the data collected during observations of the cerebral cortex of monkeys and rodents, for which scientists used machine learning techniques.
Calculations performed by researchers have shown that the existence of cyclic changes in the activity of neurons can be explained by the fact that special waves of activity "run" over the surface of the motor cortex of the brain. Based on this consideration, Russian scientists have developed two mathematical techniques that allow to use the properties of these waves to study how the activity of neurons changes during the brain's work. As Kuzmin and her colleagues hope, the approaches they have developed will accelerate the development of brain-computer interfaces and brain stimulation techniques for the treatment of neurological diseases.
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