The research suggests that humans’ experiences early in life may affect their brain activity later. iStockphoto.
It's said to be a "lightbulb" moment - when an idea pops into your head. The adult human brain often displays this kind of spontaneous activity - and University of Queensland experts have uncovered how different experiences early in life can affect the nature of that activity and, in turn, alter an individual's behaviour. Study leader Professor Geoffrey Goodhill , from the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Mathematics and Physics, used zebrafish as a model to investigate the origins of spontaneous neural activity - in the form of new thoughts. "We wanted to observe the fishes' spontaneous brain patterns to see if their environment had an impact on the way their brains wired up." The researchers found that spontaneous activity in the part of the brain that processes visual images peaked when the zebrafish were five days old, and then declined. "Zebrafish in the larvae phase are transparent, so we can directly image their neural activity," said Professor Goodhill, whose team included researchers from the UQ School of Mathematics and Physics and the UQ School of Biomedical Sciences. "We then used a branch of mathematics called graph theory to analyse the resulting patterns." The study found the visual environment the fish grew up in affected their spontaneous brain activity. Turning off the lights while the larvae developed - known as "dark rearing" - changed their brains' patterns of spontaneous activity.
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