Imagine you are sitting on the couch in your living room reading. You do it almost every night. But then, suddenly, when you look up you notice this time something is different. Your favorite picture hanging on the wall is tilted ever so slightly. In a study involving epilepsy patients, National Institutes of Health scientists discovered how a set of high frequency brain waves may help us spot these kinds of differences between the past and the present.
“Our results suggest that every experience we store into memory can be used to set our expectations and predictions for the future,” Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., principal investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), and senior author of the study published in Nature Communications. “This study shows how the brain uses certain neural activity patterns to compare our expectations with the…
