UCLA scientists teach brain cells in culture to keep time

UCLA Health article
2 min read
UCLA RESEARCH ALERT
 
FINDINGS:
The ability to tell time is fundamental to how humans interact with each other and the world. Timing plays an important role, for example, in our ability to recognize speech patterns and to create music.   
 
Patterns are an essential part of timing. The human brain easily learns patterns, allowing us to recognize familiar patterns of shapes, like faces, and timed patterns, like the rhythm of a song. But exactly how the brain keeps time and learns patterns remains a mystery.
 
In a three-year study, UCLA scientists attempted to unravel the mystery by testing whether networks of brain cells kept alive in culture could be "trained" to keep time. The team stimulated the cells with simple patterns — two stimuli separated by different intervals lasting from a 20th of a second to half a second.
 
After two hours of training, the team observed a measurable change in the cellular networks' response to a single input. In the networks trained with a short interval, the network's activity lasted for a short period of time. Conversely, in the networks trained with a long interval, network activity lasted for a longer amount of time.
 
IMPACT:
The UCLA findings are the first to suggest that networks of brain cells in a Petri dish can learn to generate simple timed intervals. The research sheds light on how brain tells time and will enhance scientists' understanding of how the brain works.
 
AUTHOR:
Dean Buonomano, professor of neurobiology and psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the UCLA Brain Research Institute, is available for interviews. 
 
FUNDING:
The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
 
JOURNAL:
The research appears in the June 13 edition of Nature Neuroscience and is available online at www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2579.html
 
GRAPHICS:
A color image showing cell-network response time is available upon request.
Media Contact:
Elaine Schmidt
(310) 794-2272
[email protected]

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Elaine Schmidt
(310) 794-2272
[email protected]
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