Neural synchrony epochs across language system

Overview: In this project, I used ICE to record signals from populations of neurons throughout the left hemisphere in a dozen patients’ brains, and assessed when and to what degree different populations synchronized their electrical activity (fired in phase with each other). I found both early and late periods of phase locking broadly throughout the language-related brain systems.

Neural synchronization is a phenomenon that may be, or be related to, a fundamental way that the brain communicates information among its many computational entities. This project is part of my larger goal to help understand how the human brain coordinates information processing, in order to capitalize on both its highly specialized ‘local’ resources and its broad networks that bring together multiple elementary faculties into high-order faculties like language.

The measure of neural synchrony employed here was “phase-locking” (see Lachaux, et al., Hum. Brain Mapping   8, 194 (1999)). The degree of phase-locking between two signals should be independent of their relative magnitude, and can be measured irrespective of the phase delay between the signals.

Detailed description coming soon.