Abstract
Cognitive functions must involve interactions between several (perhaps many) cortical regions. The instances of such interactions may not be tightly time locked to any external cue. Thus averaging over repeated trials of brain activity or its spectrograms may miss these instances. Here, coordinated activity among multiple cortical locations is revealed in ongoing activity with millisecond accuracy without the need for averaging over time or frequencies. This is based on reconstructions of the cortical current dipole amplitudes at multiple points from MEG recordings. In these current dipole traces, instances of brief activity undulations (BAUs) are automatically detected and used to reveal where and when cortical points interact. The article shows that these BAUs truly represent the reorganization of activity at the cortex and are strongly connected to behavior.
Highlights
For over 30 years, the mechanisms by which neuronal activities become bound to generate a percept or any other complexThis article forms part of a special issue of Biological Cybernetics entitled ‘Structural Aspects of Biological Cybernetics: Valentino Braitenberg, Neuroanatomy, and Brain Function’
We show here that such brief activity undulations (BAUs) exist abundantly in cortical current dipoles (CCDs) and involve different brain regions during different behavioral tasks
The initial motivation for this research was the observation that when synfire chains were simulated and two of them in different regions became synchronized, the total activity in each region was initially increased and reduced to a little above the background level (Hayon et al 2004, 2005; Aviel et al 2003)
Summary
For over 30 years, the mechanisms by which neuronal activities become bound to generate a percept or any other complexThis article forms part of a special issue of Biological Cybernetics entitled ‘Structural Aspects of Biological Cybernetics: Valentino Braitenberg, Neuroanatomy, and Brain Function’. M. Abeles The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel mental entity is being discussed, see for example, some of the behavioral, electrophysiological, and theoretical deliberations in (Triesman and Gelade 1980; Engel and Singer 2001; von der Malsburg 1999). The study of which areas in the human cortex become coordinated and at what time is carried out mostly by averaging over time and frequency of macroscopic recordings (EEG, ECoG, and MEG). Such methods do not allow for detecting the precise instance at which cortical areas start to interact
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