Neuronal coordination in the brain: A signal processing perspective

Every day you wake up, go to work, visit friends, eat an apple, basically perform your daily activities. During the day, in normal conditions, your body and mind, altogether, acts in conjunction and harmony to perform these activities. Such an harmony is dynamically realized by your body–mind entity. One of the principal centralizer of this harmony is the central nervous system, namely your brain. The brain is mainly composed of billions of cells called neurons which interact with each other and make this harmony coming to live. Grasping the more fundamental aspects of the connection between psychic experiences and physical neuronal processes is one of the last greatest challenge for neurophysiologists, neuropsychologists, psychophysicists, and any human interested in the mystery of life. Neuronal coordination is well known to be part of most information processing and integration processes in the brain that lead to high-functional conscious processes, but also to dysfunction. At the microlevel, coordination is well known to generate rhythmical neuronal activities. Local coupling mechanisms acting between these neuronal populations are responsible for the manifestation of these rhythms. They can be observed experimentally, using multiunit invasive recordings, or surface electroand magneto-encephalograms. Global coupling has also been studied and reported, and is thought of being important in the so-called binding mechanism, i.e. integration of brain function into conscious events. Coupling of such nonlinear dynamical systems, i.e. neuronal