Traveling Waves in the Human Brain

Friday, May 12, 2017

2:00 PM-4:00 PM

BIOMED PhD Thesis Defense

Title:
Traveling Waves in the Human Brain

Speaker:
Honghui Zhang, PhD Candidate, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems

Advisor:
Joshua Jacobs, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University

Abstract:
Brain oscillations are thought to be important for coordinating neural activities across different scales and regions. In my dissertation, I developed a novel analytical approach to test this hypothesis by probing spatial patterns of brain oscillations and comparing if they behave as traveling waves. I applied this method to human intracranial brain recordings collected from 97 surgical implanted patients. The results showed that, in both hippocampus and neocortex, low frequency oscillations are spatially clustered and form traveling waves. Traveling brain waves propagate through particular anatomical axes in different parts of the brain: in a posterior-to-anterior direction in both the hippocampus and the neocortex.

By examining the relation between the traveling brain waves' oscillatory frequency and propagation speed, my analyses help explain the mechanism underlying traveling waves, by showing that this phenomenon can be modeled as weakly coupled oscillators. traveling waves also exhibited behavior modulations, as the directional precision of waves in the frontal lobe correlated with cognitive efficiency in a working memory task.

By showing the prevalence, mechanism, and behavioral role of traveling waves, my study presents a new window for understanding the organization and function of brain oscillations, which is to propagate behavioral information through a large anatomical space.

Contact Information

Ken Barbee
215-895-1335
barbee@drexel.edu