Endogenous Electric Fields May Guide Neocortical Network Activity

By Flavio Fröhlich, David A. McCormick. Neuron, 2010

886 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Local field potentials and the underlying endogenous electric fields (EFs) are traditionally considered to be epiphenomena of structured neuronal network activity. Recently, however, externally applied EFs have been shown to modulate pharmacologically evoked network activity in rodent hippocampus. In contrast, very little is known about the role of endogenous EFs during physiological activity states in neocortex. Here we used the neocortical slow oscillation in vitro as a model system to show that weak sinusoidal and naturalistic EFs enhance and entrain physiological neocortical network activity with an amplitude threshold within the range of in vivo endogenous field strengths. Modulation of network activity by positive and negative feedback fields based on the network activity in real-time provide direct evidence for a feedback loop between neuronal activity and endogenous EF. This significant susceptibility of active networks to EFs that only cause small changes in membrane potential in individual neurons suggests that endogenous EFs could guide neocortical network activity.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04b10f283f89fcae3e98a92872f855936787f16f

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Citations in the corpus

The functional significance of delta oscillations in cognitive processing (2013, background): “…primary visual Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org December 2013 | Volume 7 | Article 83 | 2 cortex of anesthetized ferrets, (Frölich and McCormick, 2010) demonstrated that fluctuations in the extracellular potentials produced by the structured neocortical neuronal activity…”
The role of phase synchronization in memory processes (2011, background): “In networks of synchronized neurons, the oscillatory phase determines the degree of excitability of the neurons and influences the precise discharge times of the cells in the networ”
Age-Related Changes in 1/f Neural Electrophysiological Noise (2015, background): “…the ongoing oscillation phase (Canolty et al., 2006; Voytek et al., 2010a) analogous to spike/phase coupling (Fries, 2005; Montemurro et al., 2008; Fröhlich and Mccormick, 2010), and is proposed to play a role in coordinating neural communication (Fries, 2005; Canolty and Knight, 2010; Voytek et…”
Entrainment of brain oscillations by transcranial alternating current stimulation. (2014, positive): “Physiological Efficacy of tACS Intracranial recordings in animals demonstrated that spiking activity could be synchronized to different driving frequencies [16] and synchronized to the phase of externally applied alternating currents [17].”
Optimization of multifocal transcranial current stimulation for weighted cortical pattern targeting from realistic modeling of electric fields (2013, positive): “, neurons are influenced mostly by the component of the electric field parallel to their trajectory (Bikson et al., 2004; Fröhlich and McCormick, 2010; Ranck, 1975; Rattay, 1986; Roth, 1994; Rushton, 1927), and that the effects of tDCS depend on its polarity, knowledge about the orientation of the e”
Transcranial alternating current stimulation: a review of the underlying mechanisms and modulation of cognitive processes (2013, background): “…the inter-burst frequency of the spontaneously occurring activity can be speeded up and slowed down resulting in neural entrainment [adapted from Fröhlich and McCormick (2010)]. by Neuling et al. (2013) replicated and extended the findings of Zaehle et al. (2010) by showing that the…”
Low intensity transcranial electric stimulation: Safety, ethical, legal regulatory and application guidelines (2017, background): “For a current of 1 mA, and assuming an EF strength of 0.5 V/m and a conductivity of 0.4 S/m, the power dissipated in the cortex would be about 0.1 mW/kg, which is 5 orders of magnitude less than the metabolic heat production rate in the brain, which is about 11 W/kg (Nelson and Nunneley, 1998).”
Consciousness as a phenomenon in the operational architectonics of brain organization: Criticality and self-organization considerations (2013, background): “Additionally endogenous local fields directly affect neurons in the neuronal assembly that generates these fields [134,138].”
Causal Evidence for the Role of Neuronal Oscillations in Top-Down and Bottom-Up Attention (2019, background): “…Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, or via riddler@berkeley.edu. anuscript A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript is required to provide evidence that neuronal oscillations are not an epiphenomenon of the underlying neuronal computation (Fröhlich & McCormick, 2010; Buzsáki, 2006).”
The dominance of large-scale phase dynamics in human cortex, from delta to gamma (2026, unknown): “To this, we may add reports of the endogenous electro-magnetic field altering firing patterns of neurons ( Fröhlich and McCormick, 2010 ; Anastassiou et al., 2011 ).”
Oscillatory entrainment to our early social or physical environment and the emergence of volitional control (2022, background): “Rather, oscillatory activity biases input selection, guiding cortical spiking activity (Fr ¨ ohlich and McCormick, 2010) and temporally linking neurons into assemblies, playing a causal role in conscious perception and cognitive processing (Buzsaki, 2006; Helfrich and Knight, 2016).”