Scientists have discovered how the human brain responds to teleportation – RIA Novosti

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© Photo: Vass et al./Neuron 2016

MOSCOW, February 26 – RIA Novosti . The team of biologists and programmers conducted an unusual experiment, during which they followed up with how our brain responds to “teleport” – a sharp movement of the body in space – using virtual reality technology, according to a paper published in the journal Neuron

<. p> “our brain produces a rhythmic series of pulses during movement in space and remembering new things we decided to find out whether these pulses arise because of the information that perceive our senses, or through internal processes in the brain.” – Arne said Ekström (Arne Ekstrom) from the University of California at Davis (USA).

As explained Ekström and his colleagues, observing rats, moving through the maze, showed that the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain emits a special rhythmic pulses during the search path. Scientists have for a long time believed that these impulses are born under the influence of what he sees and feels the animal, but the evidence for this was not.

For this reason, some researchers believed that the oscillation data are simply a consequence of the memory center, extraction information from him, and not the result of processing the incoming data from the eyes and other sensory organs.

The authors decided to test whether this is so, developed an original experiment. In the framework of the scientists recruited a group of several epileptic volunteers, whose hippocampus had implanted electrodes to search for pockets of attacks, and checked how they will react to “teleport” – a sudden movement from one point in space to another

Of course, in the real world teleportation is not possible or is not feasible, so the researchers had to resort to virtual reality, which participants felt experiments using virtual reality helmets.

This virtual world was like a typical city block, built in the shape of a plus, at the ends of which were teleportatory – the device allows you to move into one of the other three “lanes”. The process of teleportation, on the idea of ​​the authors, accompanied by disabling of three seconds, after which the volunteers displayed a picture from the point where it was moved to its virtual body.

Watching the reaction of the hippocampus on this movement and ” off “level, scientists have tried to determine what actually makes the hippocampus – handles the” picture “of the eye, or extracts and reads the data from memory. In the first case teleportation should lead to a sharp decrease in power of oscillations in the hippocampus and in the second – not actually affect them.

As it turned out, was just the second hypothesis – the strength and frequency of the activity of neurons in the hippocampus almost has not changed in that time, when “Avatar” man teleported to another part of the virtual maze. On the other hand, these oscillations are changed when a volunteer “opened his eyes”, and the extent of these changes depended on how far they traveled teleporter.

This behavior hippocampus means that the data is encoded series of nerve impulses in yourself distance traveled, and speed of movement, regardless of how it was overcome distance – on foot or by teleportation. This information, as scientists believe, in the future will help us to understand how the human memory and why some people remember better way than others.