Phase coded short term memory

by Shane Legg

It’s long been thought that brain oscillations play a key role in short term memory, though there hasn’t been much empirical evidence to support this.  That now seems to have changed with the publication of Phase-dependent neuronal coding of objects in short-term memory by Siegal, Warden and Miller.  There is the paper as well as a high level commentary.  This is quite a step forward for understanding some of the more sophisticated design features of the brain and cognition.

Another interesting paper is Coherence Potentials: Loss-Less All-or-None Network Events in the Cortex by Thiagarajan, Lebedev, Nicolelis and Plenz.  They have evidence that above a certain threshold level of activity LFP information is sometimes transmitted across regions of cortex with surprisingly high fidelity.

Another cool recent paper is Rewarded Outcomes Enhance Reactivation of Experience in the Hippocampus by Singer and Frank.  They show that, well, basically what the title says.  This is not surprising, but until now there hasn’t been good evidence to show that this was happening.  If this can be replicated, and some people I know here are considering doing this, it would fill out another part of our understanding of reinforcement driven learning in the brain.

I’m coming across so many interesting neuroscience papers these days I can hardly keep up with reading them, let alone blogging about all of them.  The thing that amazes me is how the architecture of the brain is so logical — it almost looks designed.