Electrifying results from brain waves

The following is an excerpt from an article reporting recent research on monitoring the electric signals from the human brain. T he whole article is interesting, this is just a small part, of what is actually a precis.

In another paper that will publish Feb. 9 in The Journal of Neuroscience, Leuthardt and his colleagues have shown that the wavelength of brain signals in a particular region can be used to determine what function that region is performing at that time. They analyzed brain activity by focusing on data from a single electrode positioned over a number of different regions involved in speech. Researchers could use higher-frequency bands of activity in this brain area to tell whether patients:

* had heard a word or seen a word
* were preparing to say a word they had heard or a word they had seen
* were saying a word they had heard or a word they had seen.

“We’ve historically lumped the frequencies of brain activity that we used in this study into one phenomenon, but our findings show that there is true diversity and non-uniformity to these frequencies,” he says. “We can obtain a much more powerful ability to decode brain activity and cognitive intention by using electrocorticography to analyze these frequencies.”