Signs of Dynamic Processes in Organized Neural Tissue: Extracting Order from Chaotic Data

Abstract

It used to be said that anatomy has all the new techniques and physiology has fallen behind. This collection of papers, broad surveys and particular examples, like other recent samplings of a moving front, illustrates some of the range and ingenuity of methods now available for attempting to decipher the signs of dynamic, distributed, parallel processing in the brain. Besides the battery of constantly expanding tricks used on cells and parts of cells, especially the single-unit spike form of their signalling, and the armamentarium of methods for visualizing the glucose metabolism, local blood flow, local surface temperature with temperature-sensitive dyes (Shevalev et al. 1985, 1986a, b), optical changes, with and without voltage-sensitive dyes, movement of positron emitters, and impedance changes (methods represented in other literature), in this volume we see evidence of the new hardware and software for recording and analyzing electric and magnetic fields, for exploiting single and multiple electrodes, for arranging stimulus paradigms to distinguish sensory and cognitive events, for reducing volumes of data and discriminating randomness from deterministic dimensions in chaotic data.