Your brain is electric. Tiny impulses constantly race among billions of interconnected neurons, generating an electric field that surrounds the brain like an invisible cloud. A new study published online July 15 in Neuron suggests that the brain’s electric field is not a passive by-product of its neural activity, as scientists once thought. The field may actively help regulate how the brain functions, especially during deep sleep. Although scientists have long known that external sources of electricity (such as electroshock therapy) can alter brain function, this is the first direct evidence that the brain’s native electric field changes the way the brain behaves.

In the study, Yale University neurobiologists David McCormick and Flavio Fröhlich surrounded a still-living slice of ferret brain tissue with an electric field that mimicked the field an intact ferret brain produces during slow-wave sleep. The applied field amplified and synchronized the existing neural activity in the brain slice. These results indicate that the electric field generated by the brain facilitates the same neural firing that created the field in the first place, just as the cloud of enthusiasm that envelops a cheering crowd at a sports stadium encourages the crowd to keep cheering. In other words, the brain’s electric field is not a by-product; it is a feedback loop.

Although researchers knew that periods of highly synchronized neural activity (such as that of deep sleep) are crucial for maintaining normal brain function, exactly how these stable phases are coordinated—and why they go awry in dis­orders such as epilepsy—was never clear. The new study indicates scientists may find some answers in the surprisingly active role of the brain’s electric field.

“I think this is a very exciting new discovery,” says Ole Paulsen, a neuro­scientist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study. “We knew that weak electric fields could impact brain activity, but what no one had really tested before was whether electric fields produced by the brain itself could influence its own activity.”

Fröhlich sees therapeutic applications as well, particularly in improving a promising technique called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), which applies weak electric fields to the scalp to treat, for example, depression and chronic pain. Traditionally tDCS uses standard electric fields that do not change much, as opposed to the dynamic electric fields used in the new study to mimic a living brain. “The next logical step is to use these more complex waveforms in a clinical setting and see if they improve the treatment,” Fröhlich says.

This article was originally published with the title Neural Feedback.

6 Comments

1. 1. HowardB 11:33 AM 12/14/10

   I don't see the 'evidence' that is being claimed. It is equally possible that the electric field that mimicked the field of an intact ferret brain is simply mimicking how it would be if that section of the brain were back in a full sized brain and part of a full brain field generated by itself. There is no 'evidence' of what is being claimed.
   
   Weak science reaching for a premature conclusion from insufficient data and an inadequate experiment.

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2. 2. tharter in reply to HowardB 03:06 PM 12/14/10

   Uh, Howard, isn't what you just said EXACTLY what the researchers were saying? When you have a piece of brain tissue and you DO subject it to a field mimicking what it would experience in the brain it syncs up to that. If you don't then it functions in a different way. The whole point being (and the apparent conclusion reached by the researchers) being that the brain's electric field affects the brain's function.
   
   The speculation that ANY similar dynamic field would have some kind of similar effects seems quite warranted, though they will obviously want to validate that hypothesis. Sounds like some darn good science to me...

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3. 3. allicat4u2 in reply to tharter 07:59 PM 12/14/10

   Bravo

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4. 4. Reporter 07:33 AM 12/15/10

   When an organism is awake the function of its brain is focused on and restricted to activity which supports its search for food and its procreative quest but when an organism is asleep its brain is not subject to these restraints. Its brain cells can therefore grow and heal while the organism sleeps, as the organism's other cells do. The basis of every organ in every organism is the metabolic stasis of every individual cell; there can be no accurate understanding of any organ's function except one which is consistent with and appreciative of the homeostatic dynamics of cellular metabolism.

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5. 5. verdai 09:22 PM 12/16/10

   this is too fractal for any beginning.
   hmmm?
   

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6. 6. winterrecess 12:29 PM 12/17/10

   I happen to know that I'm a victim of involuntary human experimentation. Most of the internet has disinformation about what this entails. It appears that the experiments have something to do with fear conditioning, sensitization, re-traumatization, and the induction of seizures in someone they presume to have temporal lobe sensitivities. There appears to be a brain-to-behavior element to the study also. A lot of the "epileptic seizure" type attacks have been at nighttime, so it makes me wonder if the the unethical monsters behind this aren't also interested in diurnal variations in brain function.
   
   If someone has any knowledge of who might be behind this or involved in it, I ask that you do what you can to expose this program. Everything about it points to some facet of neuroscience is involved though speculating about who's behind it is pretty much a waste of time. It is cruel, unethical, and should be prosecuted as a capital crime.

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