A Non-Invasive Method of Influencing the Distribution of Noise in Human Brain Activity (thesis)

Abstract

While noise in brain activity has been studied for many years, new theoretical considerations suggest that this noise may be an important and even essential part of normal brain functioning. Here we describe a technique to non-invasively manipulate noise levels in the brain using visual stimuli. Fifteen participants viewed a variety of visual scenes containing different levels of visual noise. EEG was recorded from a montage of 78 electrodes after each scene type. Analysis of the entropy present in participants' brain activity suggests that noisy visual scenes alter the entropy in brain activity and that this induction is more accurately assessed with EEG measures that characterize entropy than with traditional metrics such as alpha.