How your brain detects patterns in the everyday: without conscious thought

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Neurons in the hippocampus help to pick out patterns in the flood of information pouring through the brain. Credit: Arthur Chien/Science Photo Library

The human brain is constantly picking up patterns in everyday experiences — and can do so without conscious thought, finds a study1 of neuronal activity in people who had electrodes implanted in their brain tissue for medical reasons.

The study shows that neurons in key brain regions combine information on what occurs and when, allowing the brain to pick out the patterns in events as they unfold over time. That helps the brain to predict coming events, the authors say. The work was published today in Nature.

“The brain does a lot of things that we are not consciously aware of,” says Edvard Moser, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. “This is no exception.”

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