Cross regional coordination of neural activity in the human brain during autobiographical self-referential processing

Abstract

For the human mind to operate, populations of neurons across remote regions of the brain need to coordinate their activity in the subsecond temporal scale. To date, our knowledge of such fast interactions involving cortical and subcortical structures in large brains, such as the human brain, remains limited. Here, we used stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG) recordings across four brain regions that are known, from decades of work, to be important for autobiographical memory processing. Our recordings involved 31 human participants implanted with intracranial electrodes in the hippocampus (HPC), posteromedial cortex (PMC), and ventromedial, as well as orbital subregions of the prefrontal cortex (OFC). In 14 subjects, we also recorded simultaneously in the anterior thalamus (ANT) across various experimental conditions and with direct electrical stimulations. Our observations provide new lines of correlative and causal evidence about the spatiotemporal profile of oscillatory coordination of cortical and subcortical activity during self-referential memory-based processing.