Scale free power spectra in the human cortex Marcel den Nijs (University of Washington) DMR 0341341. In electroencepthalography, electrodes are placed - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
cortex Marcel den Nijs (University of Washington) DMR 0341341 In electroencepthalography, electrodes are placed directly on top of the human cortex. Currently, his probe has the highest spatial and temporal resolution for collective brain activity. Our group at the University of Washington group discovered recently that the power spectrum has a broad band structure (at 70-500Hz) in addition to the classic EEG sharp peaks (at 1-30Hz) and that this broad band is more directly linked to local brain activity immediately underneath the electrodes than those earlier inhibitory peaks. This carries the promise of far reaching applications in both clinical settings and towards brain-computer interfaces. From a fundamental scientific perspective, and this NSF grant, this neurological research opens a quantitative window into exploring the working of the human brain, and a novel platform to study complexity issues familiar from statistical physics, such
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Scale free power spectra in the human cortex
Marcel den Nijs (University of Washington) DMR 0341341
In electroencepthalography, electrodes are placeddirectly on top of the human cortex. Currently, his probe has the highest spatial and temporal resolution for collective brain activity. Our group at the University of Washington group discovered recently that the power spectrum has a broad band structure (at 70-500Hz) in addition to the classic EEG sharp peaks (at 1-30Hz) and that this broad band is more directly linked to local brain activity immediately underneath the electrodes than those earlier inhibitory peaks. This carries the promise of far reaching applications in both clinical settings and towards brain-computer interfaces.
From a fundamental scientific perspective, and this NSF grant, this neurological research opens a quantitative window into exploring the working of the human brain, and a novel platform to study complexity issues familiar from statistical physics, such as scale free networks, stochastic synchronization, and self organized criticality.
A first step towards this is our discovery that this broad band obeys a power law shape, with remarkably high accuracy and an exponent very close to =4.
Our emerging neuroscience research group at the UW is a highly inter-disciplinary effort, spanning the departments of Neurosurgery, Physiology, Electric Engineering, and Physics. For this NSF grant, this represents outreach of many current concepts, methods, and results, developed within statistical physics towards those fields.
Kai Miller is a MD PhD student, who received his Physics PhD this Spring ‘08, with Marcel den Nijs as his advisor.
Future: We are continuously gathering data and are exploring, e.g., higher order temporal and spatial correlations. The power law result presented here establishes the level of accuracy of the experimental data. This allows us to engage now in a meaningful dialogue between experimental results and theoretical modeling; towards understanding of how our brains compute and memorize.
Scale free power spectra in the human cortex
Marcel den Nijs (University of Washington) DMR 0341341
This “power law” sub-project is a direct collaboration between: Kai Miller (MD-PhD student), Jeff Ojemann (neurosurgery), Larry Sorensen (exp. physics), and Marcel den Nijs. Supported by NSF grants BCS 0642848 (KM,JO) and DMR-0341341 (MdN).
