Stanford researchers may have solved a riddle about the inner workings of the brain, which consists of billions of neurons, organized into many different regions, with each region primarily responsible for different tasks. The various regions of the brain often work independently, relying on the neurons inside that region to do their work. At other times, however, two regions must cooperate to accomplish the task at hand. The riddle is this: what mechanism allows two brain regions to communicate when they need to cooperate yet avoid interfering with one another when they must work alone? In a paper published online on February 2, 2014 in Nature Neuroscience, a team led by Stanford electrical engineering professor Dr. Krishna Shenoy reveals a previously unknown process that helps two brain regions cooperate when joint action is required to perform a task. "This is among the first mechanisms reported in the literature for letting brain areas process information continuously but only communicate what they need to," said Dr. Matthew T. Kaufman, who was a postdoctoral scholar in the Shenoy lab when he co-authored the paper. Dr. Kaufman initially designed his experiments to study how preparation helps the brain make fast and accurate movements – something that is central to the Shenoy lab's efforts to build prosthetic devices controlled by the brain. But the Stanford researchers used a new approach to examine their data that yielded some findings that were broader than arm movements. The Shenoy lab has been done pioneering work in analyzing how large numbers of neurons function as a unit. As they applied these new techniques to study arm movements, the researchers discovered a way that different regions of the brain keep results localized or broadcast signals to recruit other regions as needed.Login Or Register To Read Full Story