An international team of researchers from the University of Minnesota and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies has published a study in Nature Communications on the emergence of highly organized patterns of neural activity during development. Their investigation focused on how the brain’s cortex can turn unorganized inputs into organized patterns of activity, demonstrating self-organization. The researchers emphasized the significance of this transformation. The research team found that the brain is capable of organizing its own function during development, with small-scale interactions occurring entirely within the cortex,” explained Gordon Smith, PhD, an assistant professor at the U of M Medical School. This discovery suggests that any disturbances to these small-scale interactions could significantly alter brain function, potentially affecting sensory perception and potentially playing a role in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.”
In a self-organizing system, small-scale interactions come together to create large-scale organization. Through a combination of theory and experiment, the team demonstrated that mathematical rules similar to those in self-organizing systems apply to the brain’s function.The findings indicate that the same principles that control patterns in various living and non-living systems, such as the markings on certain fish and the arrangement of sand dunes, also play a role in shaping the brain.
“Our findings suggest that the activity patterns in the early cortex of the brain emerge dynamically through feedback loops that involve a balance between local activation and lateral suppression, confirming a long-standing theoretical hypothesis about brain development,” explained Matthias Kaschube, PhD, a professor at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and co-researcher of the study.
The team of researchers utilized recently developed optical tools to conduct their research.The U of M conducted a study to demonstrate how the developing brain networks form their large-scale structure from within, rather than being influenced by an external source. Dr. Smith, a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Optical Imaging and Brain Science, stated that using advanced optical techniques, the experiments confirmed the long-held scientific theory that the brain organizes its own activity during early development. Current research is investigating the effects of changes in these self-organized neural activity patterns during early development on later sensory perception.The development of this research was funded by the National Eye Institute [grant R01EY030893-01], Whitehall Foundation [2018-05-57], National Science Foundation [IIS-2011542], and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research [BMBF 01GQ2002].
