Talk:Mu wave

Mu wave or Mu rhythm
I found both Mu wave and Mu rhythm on wikipedia, while I think both should mean the same thing. Since I'm not certain, I proposed to merge the two pages together. Addone (talk) 08:48, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree. I think that Mu rhythm should be merged into Mu wave, and not the other way around, as "Mu wave" is used similarly to "Alpha wave". I will add proper tagging on both pages. Eitt (talk) 11:28, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I also agree. Also it has to be merged with the Sensorimotor rhythm article, as they both describe the same neurophysiological phenomenon, that of smr/mu oscillations, an rhythm that overlaps with the alpha in range and differentiate mostly spatially. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ArchonMD (talk • contribs) 03:32, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I also support the merge. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:19, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I also agree. The Mu wave article could be deleted (does it say anything that is not mentioned in the other article?) and the Mu rhythm one renamed to Mu wave. --Forodin (talk) 10:34, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Comment about EEG
You can find this as a normal variant in EEG. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.191.237.229 (talk • contribs) 15:13, November 24, 2011‎

Copied from Talk:Mu rhythm. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:25, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Proposed Outline
Fellow editors,

We are students at Roosevelt University and would like to submit this outline proposing contributions that we will be making to the Mu Wave article in the near future. We will be rewriting the introduction, and plan for our contributions to be about six paragraphs long. Please feel free to offer any suggestions or comments.


 * I. Introduction
 * A. Mu wave basics
 * 1. Similar to "mu rhythm" and "sensorimotor rhythm" [include links to these articles]
 * 2. Simple, short EEG explanation
 * 3. Frequency and location
 * a. Similarities to alpha wave
 * b. Differences from alpha wave
 * B. Implications
 * 1. Mirror neuron system
 * 2. Learning and Development
 * 3. Autism
 * 4. Brain-computer interfaces
 * II. Mirror neuron system
 * A. Typical patterns
 * 1. Usually, mirror neurons activate when watching others perform motor tasks
 * 2. In people in whom the mu wave is present, it is usually suppressed when watching others perform motor tasks
 * 3. This correlation leads many to believe that mu wave suppression is linked to mirror neuron activation
 * B. Mirror neuron proposed functions
 * 1. An aid to imitating behavior
 * 2. An aid to understanding others' motives
 * III. Learning and Development
 * A. Mu wave observable in infancy and detectable within infants as young as eight months old
 * B. Mirror neuron system originates from central cortex believed to consist of the ventral premotor area (BA 44), the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) positioned near Rolandic cortical region
 * C. Acquisition
 * 1. Action execution (production)
 * 2. Action observation (prehension)
 * a. Mu wave desynchronization associated with observation of action
 * b. Mu wave present before and after observing execution of a motor task
 * 3. Infants show greater desynchronization of mu wave during the observation of goal-oriented actions than adults
 * D. Peak mu wave frequency increases to the 8-12 Hz range during maturation into adulthood
 * 1. Peak frequency as low as 5.4 Hz in six-month-old infants
 * 2. Rapid development within first year
 * 3. Peak frequency reaching 7.5 Hz by age two
 * 4. Continues development after five years of age
 * E. Cross-modal effects of action execution/action observation still to be debated
 * IV. Autism
 * A. Mirror neurons and autism
 * 1. Autism is thought by many to be associated with abnormal mirror neuron activity
 * 2. Typical pattern
 * a. Performing a motor task
 * i. Mirror neuron system activated
 * ii. Mu wave suppressed
 * b. Observing a motor task
 * i. Mirror neuron system activated
 * ii. Mu wave suppressed
 * 3. Often-observed pattern in individuals with autism
 * a. Performing a motor task
 * i. Mirror neuron system activated
 * ii. Mu wave suppressed
 * iii. Normal pattern
 * b. Observing a motor task
 * i. No mirror neuron activity
 * ii. No change in mu wave amplitude
 * iii. Abnormal pattern
 * 4. Mirror neuron deficit could be one of the main neurological deficits in people with autism
 * B. Mu wave utility in treating autism
 * 1. Conscious neurofeedback can be used to stimulate the mirror neuron system in people with autism
 * 2. Mirror neurons over the lifetime
 * a. In typical individuals, mirror neuron activity declines with age
 * b. In individuals with autism, mirror neuron activity increases with age
 * 3. In individuals with autism, the mirror neuron system appears to be active but abnormal in its developmental trajectory
 * V. Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Mu Wave
 * A. Brain-computer interface (BCI) definition and link to article
 * B. Explanation of event-related desynchronization (ERD) BCI
 * 1. With practice, users exhibit simultaneous ERD in contralateral hemisphere and event-related synchronization in ipsilateral hemisphere
 * 2. Foot vs. hand vs. tongue movement visualization
 * 3. Training on games
 * C. Can be combined with other types of BCIs to make hybrids that monitor and respond to brain activity in two different ways
 * D. Training methods
 * 1. Increasingly, entertaining games are being used to train users on BCIs
 * 2. Virtual reality games seem to enhance users' ability to modulate their ERDs appropriately

FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 19:51, 7 October 2012 (UTC) FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 11:10, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments from Tryptofish

 * Hello and welcome! I have a couple of suggestions/observations about the outline. Overall, I see it very positively, and I'll be watching with a lot of interest. One point I want to make you aware of is the merge proposal discussed in the talk section just above. Although I don't think it was ever followed through on, you should keep it in mind, since we'll probably make a single Wikipedia article out of this. The other thing is that I hope that you will read WP:MEDRS, and particularly keep it in mind when you write about autism, and about speculation about use in gaming. About autism, this is an editorially fraught subject on Wikipedia, and it's important not to write things that are still in the preliminary research stage. About speculation on possible future applications, please remember that Wikipedia does not make predictions about the future and does not make speculation based on what editors think. In other words, please stick to what the sources (scientific literature) say, and what has been accepted as reproducible and well-established. Happy editing! --Tryptofish (talk) 22:06, 7 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your input! I modified the reference to BCI and gaming to state more explicitly what the literature I have read says about its development. We will try to be balanced in our approach to writing about mu waves and autism, always acknowledging that the mirror neuron theory of autism is still theoretical. There is a good deal of research support for it, though, so we feel it is appropriate to write about. Let's keep talking about this! We are obviously new to Wikipedia and can use all the guidance we can get. Might we attempt the merge ourselves before we add content? I have no idea how to approach a merge, but we would be happy to try. We feel strongly about this content and would want to keep it no matter what the title of the article. Thanks again! FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 11:10, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Since page merges get a little complicated, I did the merge for you, and it's good to have gotten it done, anyway. If you are curious about the steps I took to do it, you can just look at the edit histories for the two pages. All I did, with respect to content, is to copy the content of the other page into a new section about the "rhythm" here. I didn't do anything to clean it up. As a result, it doesn't necessarily read that well in the context of this page as a whole, but I did that on purpose, so you can just take what's here as a starting point and work from there. -- Tryptofish (talk) 23:20, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much, Tryptofish! We will definitely fix it up. It's much better to have them as one article, even like this. Our assignment is for our edits to go live by October 23, but we'll try to get the current content in shape a little before that. FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 01:25, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Instructor comments
Neuropsychprof (talk) 12:48, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Group, this is a very nicely detailed outline. Good job!
 * Regarding merging this article with mu rhythm, I don't know how to go about this either. One thing this group can do is to be bold and attempt the merge yourselves. It seems like other editors are voicing a preferencing for keeping the mu rhythm article and deleting the mu wave article. If this student group decides to follow this recommendation, you can put your added content on mu rhythm. Manually edit the current info in the mu wave article into the mu rhythm article. Because there's not much on either right now, it should be fairly manageable.
 * Regarding keeping speculations out, one way to manage that is to make sure your paragraph on autism is shorter than others to reflect the lack of consensus scientific opinion about this topic, in addition to FutureSocialNeuroscientist's comment about being explicit in the text about current research on this topic.
 * Related to autism, I'm looking over your references and I see that you have a number of primary sources of information. Secondary sources of information, especially related to autism, are coming from ScienceDaily and Scientific American. Are these peer reviewed? I don't think they are, but correct me if I'm wrong. If you're not able to find much peered reviewed secondary sources, that's a clue as to the status of its acceptance by the scientific community now.

Comments from Smallman12q

 * Add wikilinks.
 * What is the effect of age and drugs on mu ryhthms?
 * Add a picture of a mu wave.
 * You should mention neurofeedback.

Overall, it looks well written and sourced. Smallman12q (talk) 23:39, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Reply to comments from Smallman12q

 * Thank you, Smallman12q! I will address your comments point by point.
 * Add wikilinks.
 * I was under the impression that a wikilink is a link to another Wikipedia article. Do the links we put in not work for you? They work for me. Do we need even more? I was actually worried that we were being heavy-handed with them. Maybe we need to repeat the link every time we use the term instead of only the first time?
 * What is the effect of age and drugs on mu rhythms?
 * That's an interesting question. We didn't see much about it other than a few primary sources on Parkinson's disease, but we can certainly look into it.
 * Add a picture of a mu wave.
 * Do you have any suggestions for where we might find an image of a mu wave that doesn't violate copyright? The closest thing on Wikimedia is an alpha wave, and although alpha and mu are of the same frequency, apparently their shape is slightly different (I can't see it, but those who are trained can). I might have been tempted to use the alpha wave, but a comment about its use on the sensorimotor rhythm talk page made me think twice.
 * You should mention neurofeedback
 * Do you suggest mentioning it in the context of a potential therapy for those with autism spectrum disorders or in some other application?
 * FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 23:11, 28 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Obviously, I can't speak for Smallman12q, but here are some thoughts from me. About internal links, it seems to me that the page currently has a reasonable number of them, and there isn't a big need to add much more. Maybe Smallman12q had specific pages in mind to link to, but I don't know what they would be. Wikipedia style is to link to another page only once, generally at the first appearance, so no, you should not introduce repeat links. About an image, you do have one of motor cortex in the lead already. I've looked at Wikimedia Commons, and I can't find any mu wave images. If you don't know of a properly licensed image elsewhere, it may not be worth the time and effort to hunt one down. As you noted, there is an image at sensorimotor rhythm, and you could consider adding that one here. The way to deal with those talk page issues would be to include an informative image caption, citing sources on both sides of the issue of whether it is, or is not, the same as mu (something worth clarifying here, in any case). Similarly, I'd suggest adding something to the caption of the motor cortex image, explaining what the motor cortex has to do with the mu wave, because that isn't clear now. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:25, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Tryptofish! I have expanded the caption on the motor cortex image. It's a good idea to add the alpha wave image with a caveat in the caption, so we are going to work on finding sources to back us up so we don't get anything wrong before I add that image. I have also added some wikilinks, including a few duplicates with the introduction in the sections they are important for. From reading what I could find in the help pages, this is acceptable practice, and since it's possible to jump around in the article it seemed prudent to define terms more than once. Please let me know if this goes against convention! As you know, I'm very new to all of this. Thank you for all of your help!FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 12:15, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
 * This is definitely not a big deal, but the relevant guideline on linking in this case is WP:OVERLINK. The two points to note are the last paragraph, about (normally) linking only once, and the first bullet point, about not linking plain English words if it is only to give a definition (see also WP:NOTDICT). --Tryptofish (talk) 16:19, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments from Justine28
It is very well organized, I especially liked the development section as you tied in many different ways that the mu wave has effects on childhood learning. I noticed there was talk about links by previous reviewers, but I think that you have an appropriate amount of links to the important concepts, maybe it seems off balance because I found many of the links are initially in the introduction paragraph, which I think is fine because it's a good way to get acquainted immediately with a topic if one doesn't know via a link so that the rest of the mu article is clearer, but if it seems necessary then maybe in the paragraphs about development and mirror neurons and autism there could be more links, since each has only about two links which is significantly less then the rest of the article's sections, but honestly it doesn't hinder me much and in fact I don't really see what more in those two sections you could link. But just to give my opinion and work off of what tryptofish and smallman12q were saying that could be a suggestion. I think the article is really well thought out and shows the effort placed into it. (Justine28 (talk) 03:20, 30 October 2012 (UTC))
 * I did find some more terms that both could use clarifying and have an article relating to them. I really wish there were an article out there called Desynchronization, but right now the closest term I could find was Desynchronosis (jet lag). Not what we want! Other than that frustration, though, I think I had some success in linking to articles that have the potential to improve the casual reader's understanding. For instance, in the "Development of the mu wave in individuals with autism" section I linked to the Abnormal behavior article for the word abnormal, because we're using the term in its technical connotation: differing from the norm without pejorative overtones. Hopefully the links I added will help correct the imbalance you observed. Let me know if you think otherwise, or just that there's more room for additions. Thank you for your input!FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 12:15, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments from HGilbert12

 * Ist paragraph was extremely helpful as it filled in basic information regarding the history of the study of mu waves –it also provides information on how mu waves can be manipulated for study. *What would be helpful is to tie their first and second paragraph together by explaining how mu waves became to be associated as significant with people on the autism spectrum.
 * I really like the austism and mu wave section
 * Great article! Keep up the work guys!  HGilbert12 (talk 16:32, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments from NikolazSalinas
So as reading this it is very informational, the organization is well done. The following information after the background of Mu Waves is very well put together. The comments before mine have already gave really good feedback on what to fix. The section that I enjoyed the most was the Brain-computer interfaces section of the page. This was something I never read about before hence made this a very interesting section of the wiki page. I also haven't seen any gramatical errors or spelling errors so that is good. Keep up the good work guys! — Preceding unsigned comment added by NikolazSalinas (talk • contribs) 18:53, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Instructor feedback on content
This article's content and organization are good. I do have some comments: Keep up your excellent work! Neuropsychprof (talk) 01:50, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Mu waves and mirror neurons: It is not clear in this section the relationship between mu waves and mirror neurons. Do mirror neurons exhibit mu waves? The first paragraph of the article suggests that mu waves are defined by location as well as frequency (over the motor cortex). Mirror neurons are also reported in non-motor regions. Do they also exhibit waves of this frequency? Are they called mu waves?
 * Development: If mu waves are partially defined by frequency, then how is mu waves defined during infancy when frequency ranges differ? Is location used to identify waves that later develop into the 8-13 Hz range? In other words, how is it known that 5-7Hz waves during the first 2 years of life are the 8-13 Hz mu waves of adulthood?
 * Development: The term "desynchronization" in this section needs elaboration and clarification.
 * Mirror neurons and autism: This section seems to be more appropriately conceptualized as a subsection under Mu waves and mirror neurons. This move will allow you to eliminate some repeated info in the first paragraph of the Mirror neurons and autism section. Also, remember this is an article on mu waves, not mirror neurons, so constrain your content to those that are relevant to mu waves (e.g., Development of the mu wave in individuals with autism seems to talk more about development of mirror neurons than mu waves).
 * Brain-computer interfaces: Excellent info on mu waves in this section.

Sensorimotor rhythm
As I read more about the mu wave, I run into more and more references to the sensorimotor rhythm as phenomenon separate from the mu rhythm. I don't see much of a difference between the two except frequency, but the sensorimotor rhythm's frequency is consistently described as 11-15 Hz, whereas the mu wave's frequency is usually described as either 8-12 Hz or 8-13 Hz. There is some overlap in frequency, but I am starting to feel uncomfortable with our references to the sensorimotor rhythm as being synonymous with the mu wave. If we decide that they are different phenomena, should we remove sensorimotor rhythm from the "see also" section as well as removing references to it in the text of the article? This seems like a large change for me to make without a consensus, especially since the original suggestion from ArchonMD to combine the two articles was part of a discussion that is now archived. Suggestions would be welcome. FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 16:46, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I think the most efficient approach for the time being would be to retain most of the references to sensorimotor rhythm, but to add a sentence or two explaining that some sources treat it as similar to mu, whereas other sources treat them as separate. That way, you present both sides of the coin without having to take a side (also good per WP:NPOV). --Tryptofish (talk) 23:33, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
 * My concern was primarily that, although the sources I've read make it clear that the sensorimotor rhythm and the mu rhythm are detected by the same lead placements, none of them has actually treated the two as being the same thing. In fact, the sources don't really discuss the relationship much at all. My source that indicates that they are the same is ArchonMD's comment. Should I try to contact that user and ask where the assertion came from? Thanks for all your help. FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 00:19, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't bother contacting the other editor, because they might not respond in time, and we can't cite what would be WP:OR anyway. If you have any sources that say they are not the same thing, or sources that point out any differences, you can cite that. Otherwise, you can just cite where they describe the similarities in how they are measured. And if the sources just aren't specific about the subject at all, you can just not bother with it. You don't have to go beyond what the sources that are available to you say. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:14, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't have any specific knowledge of these particular rhythms, but I've done a lot of work with the theta rhythm, and I can tell you that these sorts of confusions are par for the course when you're dealing with old EEG literature. As far as I can see the sensorimotor rhythm and mu rhythm are recorded from the same place and show the same functional correlates, so they should be understood as the same thing.  The variability in frequency range is not at all unusual, especially when you consider that different species are involved -- it looks to be like mu rhythm was first described for humans (Gastaut, 1952), whereas sensorimotor rhythm was first described for cats (M. B. Sterman et al, 1968). Looie496 (talk) 03:58, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Effects of drugs and age
To address Smallman12q's question regarding the effects of aging and drugs on the mu wave, we have been unsuccessful in finding secondary sources that give any useful information on these topics. There are one or two illnesses, such as Parkinson's disease, that are both associated with aging and known to affect mu wave function. I am uncomfortable presenting these illnesses as examples of what happens during normal aging, though. The fact is that there is comparatively little research out there on the mu wave in infancy, and research on aging is generally more sparse than research on early life. We ran into the same problem with a lack of secondary sources when investigating the effects of drugs on the mu wave. Primary sources on Parkinson's disease came up again, this time in the context of L-dopa. There weren't very many even of those. Smallman12q's questions were good ones, but do not seem to have answers that meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion in an article yet. FutureSocialNeuroscientist (talk) 04:19, 13 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree. No need to include those topics if there aren't sufficient sources. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:44, 13 November 2012 (UTC)