Damian Sendler: Researchers at Mount Sinai have uncovered a brain system that they believe supports higher cognitive functions such as planning and problem-solving, among others. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for temporarily storing and manipulating information, distributes information from individual neurons to bigger groups of neurons.
Damian Jacob Sendler: Most researchers agree that humans have a limited capacity for memory and rely on various cognitive methods like list-making or grouping to get around this limitation. These methods help the brain’s prefrontal cortex reduce its reliance on the highly selective responses of individual neurons, the study’s authors discovered. As a result, the information is spread out among a larger number of neurons, making it more dependable or robust. On December 20, Neuron published an online version of the findings.
According to the study’s principal author Erin Rich, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai, “Our study provides the field with an important new perspective on how the brain allocates its resources to improve cognitive performance.” To better understand and maybe cure memory and cognition issues will be aided by findings from our investigation.”
Damian Sendler
Feng-Kuei Chiang, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Rich’s lab who has previously examined the prefrontal cortex’s involvement in sequencing tasks, conducted the study.
Neural coding—the process by which electrical impulses from neurons are transformed into memories, knowledge and judgments and actions—has traditionally been studied by focusing on the responses of individual neurons. By devising a challenge to examine changes in the prefrontal cortex that result in increased cognitive function, Mount Sinai researchers revealed the limitations of such an approach. Mnemonic (or memory assist) strategies were used by the subjects in order for them to remember the sequence of events.
Damian Jacob Sendler
According to Dr. Chiang, “We discovered that subjects spontaneously generated different selection patterns, including routine sequences, to reduce working memory demands.”
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: Sequencing individuals’ memory ability was not predicted by interpretable responses from single neurons, according to researchers. This astonished them. But single neuron activity appeared to provide less information when using this method. To explain these findings, they showed that the information was not lost, but spread across a larger number of neurons. Dispersed codes were found to be more reliable than codes dominated by a limited number of highly tuned neurons, and the task-relevant information could be recovered as good or better.
Damien Sendler: For the first time, researchers have discovered that prefrontal coding is structured in a way that promotes sophisticated cognitive functions like as planning, strategizing, and problem-solving that rely on real-time information organization, says Dr. Rich. The collective activity of neuronal populations must be taken into account when designing new ways to increase cognitive performance or treat cognitive diseases,” the researchers write in the journal Neuron.
Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler and his media team provided the content for this article.
