You can influence your brain waves

The brain is always active. Whether we are awake or asleep, our neurons communicate and synchronize with each other. This is how brain waves arise: rhythmic patterns of neural activity. The rhythms of the brain are important for all sorts of tasks: estimating time spans, our sense of rhythm, but also directing attention – to name just a few. What’s particularly fascinating: Brain waves can be deliberately influenced!

The rhythms of brain waves control many important processes in the brain. Selective attention, for example, allows us to focus only on certain stimuli and block out irrelevant information. This is important, for example, when we are driving a car: A ball rolling onto the road and a billboard trigger different rhythms in the brain. This enables the brain to distinguish between important and unimportant information. An efficient mechanism for reacting quickly to the ball without being distracted by the billboard!

Potential treatment for anxiety and depression

These are the kinds of topics that interest Pascal Fries and his research group Neurodynamics. The rhythms of the brain are not only fascinating, but also important for better understanding, diagnosing, and treating neurological and psychiatric disorders. This knowledge could be useful for treating anxiety disorders and depression: In more anxious and avoidant people, certain areas of the right half of the brain show less alpha brain wave activity than the left half. One promising approach here is neurofeedback: Brain waves can be visualized with the help of electroencephalography (EEG). This allows patients to see their own brain activity in real time and learn how to influence it.
By the way: You can influence your brainwaves without EEG or any other technical equipment, simply by closing your eyes and relaxing. If you meditate regularly, your brainwave activity can even change permanently!

Assaf Breska, head of the Dynamic Cognition Group, has a different interest in studying the dynamics of the brain: He wants to understand how we perceive the passage of time. Almost everything we do requires us to sense how fast something is happening and to predict when an event will occur: How fast are we approaching a stop sign? When will we reach it? We have to project our own movement forward in time and make good predictions to react adequately. So does our brain possess a clock?

Different clocks ticking in our brains

Breska is convinced that there are even several clocks ticking inside us. After all, timing tasks are very different from one another: When a red traffic light turns orange, we know from experience how long it will take to turn green. We use our memory to prepare ourselves at the right moment to start the car. Something else might be going on when we sing along to a simple chorus of a song we have not heard before: Our brains predict when the next note will come, just by relying on the regularity of the rhythm. What keeps the beat: brain waves that keep going just like a child on a swing: After one initial push, the child keeps swinging back and forth at a regular pace.
But these clocks of the brain are not easy to study: they involve a structure deep in the brain called the cerebellum. Measuring its activity with EEG or other methods from the outside is very difficult. This is why the Dynamic Cognition Group works with patients whose cerebellum is damaged. Such lesions can occur after a stroke or as a result of certain neurodegenerative diseases. The researchers study which time-measuring and predicting tasks these patients can and cannot perform well. This provides insights into how healthy people perceive time.
It is hoped that these studies will one day help tailor interventions for people with cerebellar damage: A better understanding of their abilities and limitations may help them to modify their environment in ways that make everyday life easier. In the long term, research like that of the Dynamic Cognition Group may even lead to the development of new medications or of targeted cognitive training. This could help some patients to regain their independence and improve their quality of life.