By Samantha Stevens / Inc.
A recent study published in Nature Communications shows brain waves travel in distinct shapes—spirals, ripples, and straight lines—and those shapes could eventually help doctors strengthen memory in patients with cognitive decline.
Every time you think, your brain cells communicate by firing electrical signals. Researchers have long known that these signals travel across the brain in waves. But a team led by the University of Chicago found something more specific: Those waves travel in recognizable geometric shapes, and those shapes change depending on what a person is doing, such as recalling a specific item.
“We’ve known for many years that oscillations or waves of activity happen in the human brain, but here we were able to show that there are actually different spatial patterns of these waves,” said Joshua Jacobs, a professor of neurology at UChicago and the senior author of the study.
Mental fingerprints
To capture wave patterns, researchers analyzed brain recordings from 24 patients who had electrodes implanted while performing memory tasks.
One task, a “treasure hunt,” resembled a video game where the patients navigated an environment and had to remember where different objects were located. But the same task didn’t relay the same wave pattern across patients. For example, remembering a location in the treasure hunt may generate a spiral wave for one person while producing a ripple wave for another.
While wave patterns differed across individuals, they remained remarkably consistent per individual. So much so that the researchers were able to decode the behavior from the wave shape alone about 70 percent of the time (compared to chance at 50 percent), according to Pittwire.
“We saw that there is a specific shape associated with a specific type of behavior,” said Anup Das, the postdoctoral researcher who led the study. “These shapes are not random. I like to think of it as a fingerprint for each person.”