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Ian Fiebelkorn finds rhythmic brain activity helps to maintain temporary memories

Monday, April 24, 2023

New research shows that rhythmic brain activity is key to temporarily maintaining important information in memory. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester published these findings today in Current Biology that found brain rhythms—or patterns of neuronal activity—organize the bursts of activity in the brain that maintain short-term connections.

“The thought has been that the temporary storage of important information is linked to neurons in the brain that just fire away, retaining that information until it is no longer needed. Recent research has shown that it might not be such persistent brain activity that matters most for the temporary storage of information, but rather a short-term strengthening of the connections between neurons that are representing the information. Our research shows that brain rhythms are organizing these transient bursts over time,” said Ian Fiebelkorn, PhD, assistant professor of Neuroscience and senior author of the study. “The rhythmic coordination of brain activity over time is important because it allows overlapping populations of neurons to store different pieces of information at the same time.”

Fiebelkorn’s previous research around how the brain processes external information—like when navigating Times Square in New York City—made a similar discovery. He and fellow researchers found that brain rhythms help to coordinate different functions associated with either sampling presently important information or shifting to another source of information. In this context, brain rhythms help to balance focus on the task at hand with being prepared for the unexpected.