Introduction

Abstract

The human brain is the most complex system we know of. It consists of about 100 billion neurons that interact in a highly complicated fashion with each other. In my book I will conceive the brain as a physical system and study the behavior of large neural nets. Neurons are nonlinear elements. Most of them are able to produce trains of individual spikes, by which information between the neurons is exchanged. In addition, it is by now generally believed that correlations between spike trains play an important role in brain activity. One particular experimentally observed phenomenon is that of synchronization between the “firing” of neurons, where Fig. 1.1 shows an idealized case. A number of authors (see references) believe that synchronization is a fundamental mechanism that allows us to understand how the brain solves the binding problem. For instance, a lemon may be characterized by its shape, colour, smell, its name in various languages, and so on. Though all these aspects are processed in distinct parts of the brain, we nevertheless conceive the lemon as an entity. Synchronization may also help to identify individual parts of a scene as belonging to the same object. It must be noted, however, that these interpretations of the significance of synchronization are subject to ongoing critical discussions. On the other hand, synchronization among large groups of neurons may also be detrimental to healthy behavior. For instance, Parkinsonian tremor and epileptic seizures are believed to be caused by such a mechanism.