Function
Neural synchronization can be modulated by task constraints, such as attention, and is thought to play a role in feature binding, neuronal communication, and motor coordination. Neuronal oscillations became a hot topic in neuroscience in the 1990s when the studies of the visual system of the brain by Gray, Singer and others appeared to support the neural binding hypothesis. According to this idea, synchronous oscillations in neuronal ensembles bind neurons representing different features of an object. For example, when a person looks at a tree, visual cortex neurons representing the tree trunk and those representing the branches of the same tree would oscillate in synchrony to form a single representation of the tree. This phenomenon is best seen in local field potentials which reflect the synchronous activity of local groups of neurons, but has also been shown in EEG and MEG recordings providing increasing evidence for a close relation between synchronous oscillatory activity and a variety of cognitive functions such as perceptual grouping.
Read more about this topic: Neural Oscillation
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“For me being a poet is a job rather than an activity. I feel I have a function in society, neither more nor less meaningful than any other simple job. I feel it is part of my work to make poetry more accessible to people who have had their rights withdrawn from them.”
—Jeni Couzyn (b. 1942)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)
“The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.”
—Leonardo Da Vinci (1425–1519)