Wave Patterns

You’ll remember your wedding day for years to come, but finding those keys you put down an hour ago can be impossible. The dentate gyrus (pictured), a brain subregion, takes on the challenge of distinguishing between the similar micro-memories that form as we go about the repetitive rituals of daily life by generating unique patterns of activity each time. To investigate this ‘pattern separation’, researchers studied mouse brains and translated a process called feedback inhibition – where the final stage of a process turns off the first – into a computer model. They input two types of brainwaves and found that feedback inhibition contributed to stronger pattern separation in response to high frequency brainwaves, suggesting these help distinguish new events from old. Brain disorders from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s involve changes in the dentate gyrus and brain activity, so understanding how these processes build memories may explain why they fade or fail.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Daniel Müller-Komorowska and Oliver Braganza
• Institute for Experimental Epileptology and Cognition Research, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, February 2020