When you're expecting something -- like the meal you've ordered at a restaurant -- or when something captures your interest, unique electrical rhythms sweep through your brain. These waves are called gamma oscillations（振动） and they reflect a symphony of cells -- both excitatory and inhibitory（禁止的） -- playing together in an orchestrated way. Though their role has been debated, gamma waves have been associated with higher-level brain function, and disturbances¹ in the patterns have been tied to schizophrenia（精神分裂症）, Alzheimer's disease, autism, epilepsy（癫痫） and other disorders².

 

Now, new research from the Salk Institute shows that little known supportive cells in the brain known as astrocytes may in fact be major players that control these waves.

 

In a study published July 28 in the Proceedings³ of the National Academy of Sciences, Salk researchers report a new, unexpected strategy to turn down gamma oscillations by disabling not neurons but astrocytes. In the process, the team showed that astrocytes, and the gamma oscillations they help shape, are critical for some forms of memory.

 

"This is what could be called a smoking gun," says co-author Terrence Sejnowski, head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator⁴. "There are hundreds of papers linking gamma oscillations with attention and memory, but they are all correlational⁵. This is the first time we have been able to do a causal experiment, where we selectively block gamma oscillations and show that it has a highly specific impact on how the brain interacts with the world."

 

A collaboration⁶ among the labs of Salk professors Sejnowski, Inder Verma and Stephen Heinemann found that activity in the form of calcium⁷ signaling in astrocytes immediately preceded gamma oscillations in the brains of mice. This suggested that astrocytes, which use many of the same chemical signals as neurons, could be influencing these oscillations.

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