Radio in the brain
A team of researchers led by Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, says that the brain always keeps track of changing frequencies of neurones like a Frequency Modulator (FM) radio. Information is passed in form of electrical pulses to the processing centre in the cortex. The researchers monitored neurones in the cortex of rats. Even when the rats did not move their whiskers or touch anything, a tenth of the neurones had an intrinsic frequency of about 10 Hz. When the whiskers touched an object, the frequency of the neurone oscillation altered. It showed that the brain interprets signals like an FM radio (New Scientist, Vol 156, No 2105).