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Is the oscillatory power inversely proportional to the frequency?

Psychology & Neuroscience Asked on July 26, 2021

I’m trying to understand neuronal synchronization/desynchronization and oscillation, as well as the psychedelic state. The following sentence confused me a bit.

Psilocybin reduced spontaneous cortical oscillatory power from 1 to 50 Hz in posterior association cortices, and from 8 to 100 Hz in frontal association cortices.

It is taken from this article on how Broadband Cortical Desynchronization Underlies the Human Psychedelic State, featured in the Abstract section.

Now, as far as I’ve understood, the "power" of an oscillation is the square of its amplitude. In the quoted sentence, they say that the oscillatory "power" decreased with the increase of Hertz. Judging by that sentence, it would seem that an increase in the amplitude of a neuronal oscillation means a decrease in the oscillation’s frequency. Is this correct, incorrect or perhaps imprecise?

One Answer

This is sort of sloppy writing about their results, and statistical significance.

In the paper, they're analyzing data in bands 1-4Hz, 4-8Hz, 8-13Hz, 13-30Hz, 30-50Hz, and 50-100Hz.

Psilocybin reduced spontaneous cortical oscillatory power from 1 to 50 Hz in posterior association cortices

means "we saw significant reductions in all of the bands except 50-100Hz".

and from 8 to 100 Hz in frontal association cortices

means "we saw significant reductions in all of the bands except 1-4Hz and 4-8Hz".

They're not saying anything in those sentences about the magnitude of the changes, only about the locations in space and in the frequency domain where they saw changes. And it doesn't really mean they don't see changes in the other bands, just that any changes there did not meet their criteria for significance. They're also sort of mixing a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the data. The sentence in the abstract refers to Figure 3 of the paper, where you can see that the magnitude and extent of the changes is far more frequency dependent than that short sentence conveys.

Correct answer by Bryan Krause on July 26, 2021

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