PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Parameshwaran, Dhanya
AU  - Thiagarajan, Tara C.
TI  - Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG
AID  - 10.1101/125898
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 125898
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/11/125898.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/11/125898.full
AB  - 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.