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"The discovery, by a team led by Graybiel, could lead to new treatments for
diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, where the ability to control the
timing
of movements is impaired."

Now this is an interesting concept! It opens up a completely new dimension
of thinking about overcoming the PD symptoms. At least for me anyway...

Nic 57/15

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:56 PM, mschild <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Scientists identify brain’s tiny timekeepers
>
> WASHINGTON - How does your brain recall that you brush your teeth before
> you
> took a shower, and not the other way around? A study has now identified
> groups
> of neurons in the primate brain that code time with extreme precision.
> Keeping track of time and remembering past events is one of the brain’s
> most
> important tasks, amid the welter of sights and sounds that it processes.
> For decades, neuroscientists theorised that the brain “time stamps” events
> as
> they happen, allowing us to keep track of where we are in time and when
> past
> events occurred. However, they couldn’t find any evidence that such time
> stamps
> really existed — until now.
> Ann Graybiel, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
> says: “All you do is time stamp everything, and then recalling events is
> easy:
> you go back and look through your time stamps until you see which ones are
> correlated with the event.”
> That kind of precise timing control is critical for everyday tasks such as
> driving a car or playing the piano, as well as keeping track of past
> events.
> The discovery, by a team led by Graybiel, could lead to new treatments for
> diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, where the ability to control the
> timing
> of movements is impaired.
> Researchers trained two macaque monkeys to perform a simple eye-movement
> task.
> After receiving the “go” signal, the monkeys were free to perform the task
> at
> their own speed.
> The researchers found neurons that consistently fired at specific times —
> 100
> milliseconds, 110 milliseconds, 150 milliseconds and so on — after the “go”
> signal.
> “Soon enough we realised we had cells keeping time, which everyone has
> wanted
> to find, but nobody has found them before,” says Graybiel, who is also an
> investigator in MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
> The neurons are located in the prefrontal cortex, which play important
> roles
> in learning, movement and thought control, says a MIT release.
> Key to the team’s success was a new technique that allows researchers to
> record electrical signals from hundreds of neurons in the brain
> simultaneously, and a mathematical way to analyse the brain signals,
> spearheaded by team members Naotaka Fujii of the RIKEN Brain Institute in
> Japan and Dezhe Jin of Penn State.
> These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
> Sciences.
>
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