Columbia Engineering/UCLA team is first to demonstrate that demonstrate for the first time that phase precession plays a significant role in the human brain, and links not only sequential positions, as seen in animals, but also abstract progression towards specific goals.
For decades the dominant approach to understanding the brain has been to measure how many times individual neurons activate during particular behaviors. In contrast to this “rate code,” a more recent hypothesis proposes that neurons signal information by changing the precise timing when they activate. One such timing code, called phase precession, is commonly observed in rodents as they navigate through spaces and is thought to form the basis for how the brain represents memories for sequences. Surprisingly, phase precession has never been seen in humans, and thus its usefulness in explaining brain function and creating brain-machine interfaces has been quite limited.
In a study, Joshua Jacobs, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, in collaboration with Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, demonstrate the existence of this neural code in the human brain for the first time, and show that phase precession not only links sequential positions, as in animals, but also abstract progression towards specific goals.
“We were convinced that phase precession held a lot of promise as a widespread neural code that could be used for learning and cognition,” says Salman E. Qasim, lead author of the study who received his PhD from Columbia Engineering in 2021. “There’s no reason the human brain wouldn’t take advantage of this mechanism to encode any kind of sequence, spatial or otherwise.”
AANS Neurosurgeon is the official socioeconomic publication of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and features information and analysis for contemporary neurosurgical practice. Published monthly online, AANS Neurosurgeon focuses on issues related to neurosurgery legislation, the workforce and practice management.
