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Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG

Dhanya Parameshwaran, Tara C. Thiagarajan
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/125898
Dhanya Parameshwaran
1Human Brain Diversity Project, Sapien Labs, Chennai India
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Tara C. Thiagarajan
2Human Brain Diversity Project, Sapien Labs, Arlington VA, USA
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  • For correspondence: tara@sapienlabs.org
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ABSTRACT

Oscillations in the alpha range (8-15 Hz) have been found to appear prominently in the EEG signal when people are awake with their eyes closed, and since their discovery have been considered a fundamental cerebral rhythm. While the mechanism of this oscillation continues to be debated, it has been shown to bear positive relation to memory capacity, attention and a host of other cognitive outcomes. Here we show that this feature is largely undetected in the EEG of adults without post-primary education and access to modern technologies. Furthermore, we show that the spatial extent and energy of the oscillation have wide variation, with energy ranging over a thousand fold across the breath of humanity with no centralizing mean. This represents a divergence in a fundamental functional characteristic of an organ demonstrating both that modernization has had a profound influence on brain dynamics and that a meaningful ‘average’ human brain does not exist in a dynamical sense.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 11, 2017.
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Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG
Dhanya Parameshwaran, Tara C. Thiagarajan
bioRxiv 125898; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/125898
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Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG
Dhanya Parameshwaran, Tara C. Thiagarajan
bioRxiv 125898; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/125898

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