Spatiotemporal organization of human sensorimotor beta burst activity
- University College London, United Kingdom
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, France
Abstract
Beta oscillations in human sensorimotor cortex are hallmark signatures of healthy and pathological movement. In single trials, beta oscillations include bursts of intermittent, transient periods of high-power activity. These burst events have been linked to a range of sensory and motor processes, but their precise spatial, spectral, and temporal structure remains unclear. Specifically, a role for beta burst activity in information coding and communication suggests spatiotemporal patterns, or travelling wave activity, along specific anatomical gradients. We here show in human magnetoencephalography recordings that burst activity in sensorimotor cortex occurs in planar spatiotemporal wave-like patterns that dominate along two axes either parallel or perpendicular to the central sulcus. Moreover, we find that the two propagation directions are characterised by distinct anatomical and physiological features. Finally, our results suggest that sensorimotor beta bursts occurring before and after a movement can be distinguished by their anatomical, spectral and spatiotemporal characteristics, indicating distinct functional roles.
Data availability
Data are available via the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf. io/eu6nx. Data are also archived at the Open MEG Archive (OMEGA; Nisoetal.,2016) and may be accessed via http://dx .doi.org/10.23686/ 0015896 (Niso et al.,2018) after registration at https:// www.mcgill.ca/bic/resources/omega.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Brain Research UK (201718-13)
- Catharina Zich
Brain Research UK (201617-03)
- Catharina Zich
Wellcome Trust (098369/Z/12/Z)
- Andrew J Quinn
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/T001046/1)
- George O'Neill
Medical Research Council (MR/N013867/1)
- Lydia C Mardell
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The study protocol was in full accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and all participants gave written informed consent after being fully informed about the purpose of the study. The study protocol, participant information, and form of consent, were approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee (reference number 5833/001).
Copyright
© 2023, Zich et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Spatiotemporal organization of human sensorimotor beta burst activity
eLife 12:e80160.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.80160
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