Critically synchronized brain waves form an effective, robust and flexible basis for human memory and learning

" Our hypothesis, based upon our recently developed physical model of weakly evanescent brain wave propagation (WETCOW) is that, contrary to the current orthodox model that brain neurons just integrate and fire under accompaniment of slow leaking, they can instead perform much more sophisticated tasks of efficient coherent synchronization/desynchronization guided by the collective influence of propagating nonlinear near critical brain waves, the waves that currently assumed to be nothing but inconsequential subthreshold noise." {Credits 1}

" It is a curious development in the history of neuroscience that the mismatch between the observed spiking behavior of neurons and a model of the system that is incapable of producing spiking was met not with a reformulation to a more physically realistic model, but instead with what can only be described as an ad-hoc patchwork fix: the introduction of a “firing threshold” Θ that defines when a neuron finally stops integrating the input, resulting in a large action potential almost magically shared with its neighboring neurons, after which the membrane voltage U is reset by hand back to the resting potential Urest." {Credits 1}

" In short, the physical situation described by (1) is contradictory to many careful neuroscience experiments that show, for example, that 1) the neuron is anisotropically activated following the origin of the arriving signals to the membrane; 2) a single neuron’s spike waveform typically varies as a function of the stimulation location; 3) spatial summation is absent for extracellular stimulations from different directions; 4) spatial summation and subtraction are not achieved when combining intra- and extra- cellular stimulations, as well as for nonlocal time interference [13]." {Credits 1}

" The recently developed theory of weakly evanescent brain waves (WETCOW) [14–16] shows from a physical point of view that propagation of electromagnetic fields through the highly complex geometry of inhomogeneous and anisotropic domain of real brain tissues can also happen in a wave-like form." {Credits 1}

{Credits 1} 🎪 Galinsky, V.L., Frank, L.R. Critically synchronized brain waves form an effective, robust and flexible basis for human memory and learning. Sci Rep 13, 4343 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31365-6. © 2023 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License..