It may sound odd, but the scientists say so. Sometimes it seems that scientists say anything arbitrarily. Doesn’t it?  But the fact is that they help us know the truth about the nature.The surprising results are encountered in the fields in which humanity is still farther from the truth. One such field is certainly the functioning of brain. But the never tiring scientists make us believe that one day we will know the whole truth or at least will be quite near knowing that.

The latest news is that scientists have found a link between the learning rhythm of the brain and the running speed. They say the rhythms of the brain become stronger if the body moves faster.

The gamma rhythm in the brain of mice was measured with the help of specialized microelectrodes by the research team. The leader of the team Professor Mayank Mehta led his team to measure the electrical signals in the hippocampus area of the brain which is related with the concentration, learning and memory of the brain.

The team found that the electrical signals or the gamma rhythm of the brain increased with an increase in the running speed. This adds new wings to our understanding of the learning process in the brain, a still little explored field.

“The gamma rhythm is known to be controlled by attention and learning, but we find it is also governed by how fast you are running,” said Mehta, associate professor of physics and astronomy, neurology, and neurobiology. “This research provides an interesting link between the world of learning and the world of speed.”

The study is published in online release of the Public Library of Science.

How does learning take place?

The lead author of the study explains that the hippocampus area of the brain temporarily stores the events that an individual encounters. When we sleep these instant memories are transferred to other parts of the brain for further storage. It means if the hippocampus is somehow damaged, it will be difficult to learn new things.

More importantly the facts about the hippocampus area may help treat the diseases like epilepsy and Alzheimer disease as these diseases have to do with related with this region of the brain.

“Deciphering the language of the brain is one of the biggest challenges that human beings face,” he said. “If we can learn to interpret these brain oscillations, it may be possible to successfully intervene in cases ranging from learning disorders to post-traumatic stress, or even to mitigate the effects of cognitive decline with aging.”

The whole of the brain has got billions of the neurons connected and communicating with one another through electrochemical means. The hippocampus stores the positional information with its special language of thorough spikes and sharp pulses.

“You can imagine the brain as a large orchestra; the gamma rhythm is a continuously playing violin, punctuated by neuronal spikes similar to the beats of a drum” said Zhiping Chen, physics graduate student in Mehta’s laboratory associated with the study.

To understand this language demands the study of large amount of data says Professor Mehta. Only doing this we could relate it with the learning process and other behavioral issues.

“The biophysical laws that govern a single neuron are fairly well known,” Mehta said. “What is not known is how those billions of neurons interact with one another and form the mind.”

Here the study crosses the limits of one discipline becoming interdisciplinary. We need doctors; we need engineers; and physicists and mathematicians and so on.

“We hope to explore the connection between psychology and neuroscience. Studying how the individual brain cells interact can explain how consciousness arises,” said Chen.

The study

“The hippocampus is critical for navigation,” Chen said. “Cells in the hippocampus encode position information, but to navigate, it is not enough to know where you are; you must also know how fast you are going. We concluded there must be a separate brain signal that encodes this speed information.”

In the study, about 20GB data was collected every day with the help of micro wires of thickness one twentieth that of human hair.

And the result was unexpected with the gamma rhythm data being importantly visible to be related with the learning process. As the mice ran faster the rhythm got stronger.

“It is rare to find a relationship that is so clear,” Chen said. “When we first saw the results, we were surprised and excited.”

Can this movement be related with the pace of the learning process? It is too early to say now, say Mehta.

“With these new results, we are asking questions which we never imagined,” he said.

“Surprisingly, the two signals become increasingly separated in time with increasing speed,” he said.

Other authors of the study are from Max Plank Florida Institute and Max Planck Institute for Medical Research.

The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, as well as the Whitehall Foundation and the W.M. Keck Foundation funded the study.

Interdisciplinary Career

Mr. has had an interesting journey of his career. He was a theoretical physicist first. He was interested in the space time relationship the Stephen Hawking-fame topic. He was critical of the long standing ideas since has was a student.

While studying the six dimension of the universe he developed his interest in the learning process of such complex and abstract issues itself. And he crossed the limits of his discipline.

Mehta has been associated with studies on the hippocampus of the brain earlier as well. The question now before him is to relate the activity of the hippocampus and the behavior.

“It is amazing that we can understand things that are absolutely unnecessary for our survival,” Mehta said. “The brain is a very complex place, and our intuition about the mind is not enough to understand the brain. If we can first determine the rules of the brain, they will likely point in a direction that we have never imagined.”