Does the human brain really have "nerd cells"?

Were you impressed when NASA managed to calculate the timing and speed of a rocket's trajectory? Your brain has a "nerd center" capable of more complex calculations, according to a new study from the University of Oslo

If you're late on your way to work and you see the bus coming and run over with your coffee, you've probably beaten NASA

After five years of research on the theory of continuous attractor networks (CAN), Charlotte Boccara and her team of scientists at the Institute of Basic Medicine, University of Oslo, have achieved a breakthrough, now at the Norwegian Centre for Molecular Medicine (NCMM)

"We are the first to definitively demonstrate that the 'nerd cell' or 'supercomputer' proposed by the CAN theory does exist in the human brain

1400 nerve cells

Boccara analyzed 1,400 nerve cells distributed across multiple regions of the rat brain

"We equipped the mice with small brain probes with very thin electrodes that read their brain activity

Using an advanced form of data analysis, Boccara's team thoroughly investigated what was happening in all cortical layers in several regions of the brain

This is the missing piece of the puzzle that may be important for Alzheimer's research

The CAN theory studied by Boccara has been widely popular among scientists for decades

Until then, the existence of hidden layers was just a theory with no clear evidence

Boccara and her team discovered that this hidden layer is the region of the brain that is first damaged during Alzheimer's disease

"Our findings are important because these cells tell us where we are and how we move

Why are the nerve cells Boccara found in different parts of the brain? Could they perform multiple different tasks?

"Here, we have some theories: Do some cells act as backups, or do they perform separate computations, that is, some cells plan while others respond to previous experience?"

At all times, the brain is bombarded with sensory experiences (sight, feeling, hearing)

In recent years, the research community has demonstrated that the brain regions of interest to Boccara are involved in more tasks than spatial location mapping

"But how you perceive this phenomenon depends on your experience

Boccara now wants to know how bad sleep affects the computing power of nerd cells

"I wondered if the reason the brain works more slowly when we get too little sleep has something to do with the abnormal activity of these cells," she said
.

Courtesy of the University of Oslo

Magazine

Nature Communications