Shaping functional architecture of the working brain: gating by inhibition
The 'Neuronal Oscillations' research group is situated at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. The group is headed by Dr. Ole Jensen.
The main go al of the 'Neuronal Oscillations' research group is to understand how oscillatory activity shapes the f unctional architecture of the working brain during cognitive processing. Our working hypothesis is that information is gated by inhibiting task-irrelevant regions, thus routing information to task-relevant regions. The functional inhibition is reflected in oscillatory activity in the alpha band (8-13 Hz). From a physiological perspective, the alpha activity provides pulsed inhibition reducing the processing capabilities of a given area. Active processing in the engaged areas is reflected by neuronal synchronization in the gamma band (30-100 Hz) accompanied by an alpha band decrease. According to this framework the brain can be studied as a network by investigating cross-frequency interactions between gamma and alpha activity. Our main research tool is MEG which allows us to record oscillatory brain activity from various regions with a sensible spatial resolution. We address our research questions using attention and memory tasks. In addition we are using intracranial data and EEG combined with fMRI recordings and TMS.