New techniques show how electrical impulses travel with high speed in our brain

 These findings allow them to create better theories and tools to understand demyelinating diseases, including the most common neurological disorder, multiple sclerosis. The paper has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Cell.

What is the study talking about?

The brain consists of around one hundred billion neurons. All these neurons have to communicate with each other. This happens by means of exchanging electrical impulses traveling at velocities of up to 360 km/h.

According to Professor Maarten Kole, "We know this requires the presence of myelin sheaths, consisting of multiple layers of fatty material wrapped around the nerve cell extensions. Myelin is often conceptualized as being an insulator that leads to the "jumping" of electrical potentials along with the cables that we could see as the 'highways of our brain', but the mechanisms of jumping were not understood. However, this research opens new avenues to understand the hardware of the brain in terms of how they compute with a rapid signal transfer."

What were the findings?

Furthermore, the scientists of the NIN used a new technique to make electricity visible and took advantage of a supercomputer to calculate the specific properties of myelin sheaths. "All the findings together showed that instead of being an insulating sheath, myelin creates an additional layer like coaxial cables producing multiple waves of electrical potentials traveling in a more complicated manner than was envisioned earlier", Kole explains.

These findings open new avenues to understand the hardware of how brains are computing with the rapid signal transfer.

This research also will help to better understand demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS). In patients with MS, myelin sheaths are broken down.

This leads to an increasing degree of limitations that affect strength, balance, and coordination, and thus the patient's mobility. In order to be able to cure and prevent MS, it is important to know the exact way the myelin sheath functions in order to predict what happens if it doesn't function as it should. "Our work now may provide reliable predictions of how impulses travel along the highways without myelin. This finding contributes to the understanding of the cellular changes occurring in MS," says Kole.