What Can Synergetics Contribute to the Understanding of Brain Functioning

At present we witness the growth of the number of institutions that deal with EEG and MEG measurements. This chapter, and moreover the whole book is concerned with the analysis of EEG and MEG data. In these experiments, electric and/or magnetic fields are measured by means of arrays of sensors. The measurements consist in recording time-series of the corresponding fields. The spatial resolution is given by the separation of the sensors on the scalp. Because the temporal resolution is high and modern equipment uses numerous sensors, an enormous amount of data becomes available. To reduce the amount of information, methods such as filtering of frequency bands and/or data averaging are frequently used. More recently it has been questioned (e.g. by P. Tass, cf. his chapter in this book) whether averaging is permissible, because important correlations might be obscured. This problem probably does not occur, however, if external pacemakers are used, as in the Kelso experiments (cf. his contribution to this book).

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