A BOLD window into brain waves

The brain is never inactive. Neurons fire at leisurely rates most of the time, even in sleep (1), although occasionally they fire more intensely, for example, when presented with certain stimuli. Coordinated changes in the activity and excitability of many neurons underlie spontaneous fluctuations in the electroencephalogram (EEG), first observed almost a century ago. These fluctuations can be very slow (infraslow oscillations, 30 Hz). Moreover, slower fluctuations appear to group and modulate faster ones (1, 2). The BOLD signal underlying functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) also exhibits spontaneous fluctuations at the timescale of tens of seconds (infraslow, <0.1 Hz), which occurs at all times, during task-performance as well as during quiet wakefulness, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and non-REM sleep (NREM). Although the precise mechanism underlying the BOLD signal is still being investigated (3–5), it is becoming clear that spontaneous BOLD fluctuations are not just noise, but are tied to fluctuations in neural activity. In this issue of PNAS, He et al. (6) have been able to directly investigate the relationship between BOLD fluctuations and fluctuations in the brain's electrical activity in human subjects.

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