Originally published November 1 2005
Duke scientists study the brain's methods of keeping time
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Duke neuroscientists Catalin Buhusi and Warren Meck have been studying the interaction of the brain's various clocks to better understand its complex timing mechanisms.
In a review article in the October 2005 Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Buhusi and Meck discuss the current state of understanding of one of the brain's most important, and mysterious, clocks -- the one governing timing intervals in the seconds to minutes range.
Such interval timing occupies the middle neurological ground between two other clocks -- the circadian clock that operates over the 24-hour light-dark cycle, and the millisecond clock that is crucial for such functions as motor control and speech generation and recognition.
Deciphering the neural mechanisms of such clocks may be even more fundamental to understanding the brain than figuring out, for example, neural processing of spatial position and movement, they said.
Understanding the machinery of interval timing is profoundly difficult because it is "amodal," said Buhusi and Meck.
"So, this process has to be distributed so it can integrate information from all the senses," said Meck.
In the 1980s Meck and his colleagues at Brown and Columbia Universities proposed what became the traditional theory for explaining interval timing which involved a "pacemaker-accumulator" model.
The striatum is a part of the brain structure known as the basal ganglia, which control basic body functions such as movement.
In this model, explained Buhusi, "each structure in the brain contributes its own resonance, and all these oscillations are monitored and integrated by the basal ganglia or striatal circuits.
These include studies using genetically modified mice, pharmacological tools, recording of electrical brain signals in ensembles of brain cells and functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain.
For example, they are studying how the clock's ticking changes in Parkinson's patients as they change levels of their medication, which effects the amount of dopamine in their brains.
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