Question: What Are Brain Waves?

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  1. As far as I know they are patterns of neuronal firing.

    Brain cells fire off electronic signals, how often and in what pattern they do it varies. When most of them fire in the same sort of pattern, it shows up on an EEG.

    For instance, slow wave sleep, which is apparently good for memorizing things is at 0.5-3 cycles per second.

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  2. Yep, its all to do with the activity of our brain cells. The brain cells talk to each other using electricity and the brain waves measure the changes in this electrical flow across the skull.

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Comments

  1. So the electrical flow is classified as Brain Waves?

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  2. you’re pushing my knowledge on this one narwhale 🙂 I didn’t do physics 🙂
    But, basically the measurement of brain waves is called electroencephalography (EEG) and this measures the change in voltage across the scalp during brain activity. It doesn’t measure the change in voltage from one single neuron, because this is too small to be detected using EEG. Rather, it measures synchronous activity, meaning groups of neurons that are active together at the same time. Its really useful for studying epilepsy, where the brain is over-activated and excited and for deciding whether a person is brain dead or in a coma. I hope that clears it up for you 🙂

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