Surgical Neurology Branch, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2024 Oct 17;15(1):8969. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-52744-1.
Remembering our everyday experiences involves dynamically coordinating information distributed across different brain regions. Investigating how momentary fluctuations in connectivity in the brain are relevant for episodic memory formation, however, has been challenging. Here we leverage the high temporal precision of intracranial EEG to examine sub-second changes in functional connectivity in the human brain as 20 participants perform a paired associates verbal memory task. We first identify potential functional connections by selecting electrode pairs across the neocortex that exhibit strong correlations with a consistent time delay across random recording segments. We then find that successful memory formation during the task involves dynamic sub-second changes in functional connectivity that are specific to each word pair. These patterns of dynamic changes are reinstated when participants successfully retrieve the word pairs from memory. Therefore, our data provide direct evidence that specific patterns of dynamic changes in human brain connectivity are associated with successful memory formation.
回忆我们的日常经历涉及到动态协调分布在不同大脑区域的信息。然而，研究大脑连接瞬间波动如何与情景记忆形成相关一直具有挑战性。在这里，我们利用颅内 EEG 的高时间精度，在 20 名参与者执行配对联想口头记忆任务时，检查大脑中功能连接的亚秒级变化。我们首先通过选择跨新皮层的电极对来识别潜在的功能连接，这些电极对在随机记录片段中表现出与一致时间延迟的强相关性。然后，我们发现任务期间成功的记忆形成涉及到功能连接的亚秒级动态变化，这些变化是特定于每一对单词的。当参与者从记忆中成功检索单词对时，这些动态变化的模式会重新出现。因此，我们的数据提供了直接的证据，表明人类大脑连接的特定动态变化模式与成功的记忆形成有关。
