Alpha Waves, what's going on?

[Xenu]

When a part of the brain is in general use, an EEG picks up Beta waves. These waves tend to be irregular and low frequency, caused by milions of neurons firing at different times.

However when the part of the brain goes to rest (it's not in active use), big huge Alpha waves are picked up. These waves come from a sumnation of neurons firing at the same time. It's like all of a sudden, all of these neurons are firing to a certain rhythm, at a very regular rate?

How is this rhythm set?

What's the purpose of this rhythm?

 

[Alpha]

There probably is no purpose. It's probably just an effect of what's going on.

 

[Xenu]

If these waves are mere products, could someone suggest a theory of why neurons will synchronously (at the same time) when that part of the brain is in a relaxed state?

 

[kmguru]

No one really knows, because we have not decoded the program ie unit activities taking place in each small area of the brain.

It may be speculated that just when you walk, you walk in a rhythm, so the firing of nurons may be similar. If you take a look at ethernet data packets on a scope (on a streaming basis) , you will see a rhythm too - until you look at the individual packets which are diffrent from one another (information wise).