Interconnected networks of neurons process information and give rise to perception by communicating with one another via small electrical impulses known as action potentials.

In the past, scientists believed that adjacent neurons synchronized their action potentials.

Their findings provide detail as to how the brain accesses and processes information.

"Understanding healthy neuronal activity is one of the first steps to unlocking the brains of those with illnesses such as autism," said Dr. Andreas S. Tolias, assistant professor of neuroscience at BCM and senior author on the paper.

The patterns of action potentials are organized to allow our brain to work efficiently. For example, the visual cortex, which is the area of the brain where information from the eyes is processed, contains around two dozen distinct regions organized in a hierarchical fashion. People can see and interpret the surrounding world because the information is processed (through action potentials) through this organized system from one region to the next.

Tolias, who is also on the staff at with the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said, "If you were to eavesdrop on the activity of a neuron in the visual part of the brain while a person is looking at a picture over and over again, the neuron will respond differently each time. In other words, a substantial part of the activity is unrelated to the picture itself. It is this activity that was believed to be common among many adjacent neurons because they are densely interconnected."

"Here is where problems begin to arise," Tolias said. "If the activity that is unrelated to the picture is common to many cells, it would build up from one stage of processing to the next, ultimately dominating brain activity and making information processing impossible - a scenario called runaway synchrony."

To find an answer to this paradox, Tolias and his colleagues, including Alexander S. Ecker, the paper's first author who is a graduate student in Tolias' lab at BCM and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany developed a new technology that allowed more precise measurement of action potentials. They found that the groups of neurons believed to be reacting in a related fashion actually had a weak relationship. They were reacting on their own, not dependent on each other.

"Neurons in cortical circuits. (Credit: Image courtesy of Andreas Tolias Lab, Baylor College of Medicine.)"

Source: Baylor College of Medicine