A putatively novel form of spontaneous coordination in neural activity

We simultaneously recorded local field potentials from three sites along the olfactory-entorhinal axis in rats lightly anesthetized with isoflurane, as part of another experiment. While analyzing the initial data from that experiment with spectrograms, we discovered a potentially novel form of correlated neural activity, with near-simultaneous occurrence across the three widely separated brain sites. After validating their existence further, we named these events Synchronous Frequency Bursts (SFBs). Here we report our initial investigations into their properties and their potential functional significance. In Experiment 1, we found that SFBs have highly regular properties, consisting of brief (approximately 250 ms), high amplitude bursts of LFP energy spanning frequency ranges from the delta band (1-4 Hz) to at least the low gamma band (30-50 Hz). SFBs occurred almost simultaneously across recording sites, usually with onsets <25 ms apart, and there was no clear pattern of temporal leading or lagging among the sites. While the SFBs had fairly typical, exponentially decaying power spectral density plots, their coherence structure was unusual, with high peaks in several narrow frequency ranges and little coherence in other bands. In Experiment 2, we found that SFBs occurred far more often under light anesthesia than deeper anesthetic states, and were especially prevalent as the animals regained consciousness. Finally, in Experiment 3 we showed that SFBs occur simultaneously at a significant rate across brain sites from putatively different functional subsystems--olfactory versus motor pathways. We suggest that SFBs do not carry information per se, but rather, play a role in coordinating activity in different frequency bands, potentially brain-wide, as animals progress from sleep or anesthesia toward full consciousness.