Is Alpha Indicating Attention?

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Ole Jensen is co-director of the Centre for Human Brain Health at University of Birmingham, where he runs his Neuronal Oscillations Group lab. Ole is interested in how the oscillations in our brains affect our cognition by helping to shape the spiking patterns of neurons, and by helping to allocate resources to parts of our brains that are relevant for whatever ongoing behaviors we're performing in different contexts. People have been studying oscillations for decades, finding that different frequencies of oscillations have been linked to a bunch of different cognitive functions. Some of what we discuss today is Ole's work on alpha oscillations, which are around 10 hertz, so 10 oscillations per second. The overarching story is that alpha oscillations are thought to inhibit or disrupt processing in brain areas that aren't needed during a given behavior. And therefore by disrupting everything that's not needed, resources are allocated to the brain areas that are needed. We discuss his work in the vein on attention - you may remember the episode with Carolyn Dicey-Jennings, and her ideas about how findings like Ole's are evidence we all have selves. We also talk about the role of alpha rhythms for working memory, for moving our eyes, and for previewing what we're about to look at before we move our eyes, and more broadly we discuss the role of oscillations in cognition in general, and of course what this might mean for developing better artificial intelligence.

• The Neuronal Oscillations Group.
• Twitter: @neuosc.
• Related papers
  • Shaping functional architecture by oscillatory alpha activity: gating by inhibition
  • FEF-Controlled Alpha Delay Activity Precedes Stimulus-Induced Gamma-Band Activity in Visual Cortex
  • The theta-gamma neural code
  • A pipelining mechanism supporting previewing during visual exploration and reading.
  • Specific lexico-semantic predictions are associated with unique spatial and temporal patterns of neural activity.

0:00 - Intro 2:58 - Oscillations import over the years 5:51 - Oscillations big picture 17:62 - Oscillations vs. traveling waves 22:00 - Oscillations and algorithms 28:53 - Alpha oscillations and working memory 44:46 - Alpha as the controller 48:55 - Frequency tagging 52:49 - Timing of attention 57:41 - Pipelining neural processing 1:03:38 - Previewing during reading 1:15:50 - Previewing, prediction, and large language models 1:24:27 - Dyslexia