Russian scientists of the Neuroeconomic Center and Cognitive Studies of HSE disclosed the mechanism for the formation of working memory in the human brain. This is reported in the article published in the Frontiers magazine in Neural Circuits. Briefly about scientific work is told in a press release sent to the editor of the “Renta.ru”.
It is known that the use of working memory is associated with gamma rhythms – electrical oscillations in the human brain with frequencies of 30-170 Hertz. When the working memory holds information in the absence of an external stimulus, an increase in the intensity of gamma oscillations compared with the state of rest. Thus, the memory requires not only the activity of individual neurons, but also the collective rhythmic activity of neural networks.
Scientists have built a numerical model of working memory based on neural networks, which contain populations of neurons, between which the excitation links are functioning. Such neural networks transfers from the background state to active under the action of a short external incentive. The active condition is characterized by metastability, that is, stability that persists for a short time.
It turned out that such a state that stores incentive information is more stable if the neurons at the input receive the same noise signal, which consists of signals from all network elements when the stimulated nerve cells are discharged randomly. If the input is applied to gamma rhythm, it increased the ability of work memory to hold information.