Hippocampal Rhythmic Slow Activity and Neocortical Low-Voltage Fast Activity: Relations to Behavior

Experimental studies attempting to relate brain electrical activity to behavior have become commonplace in the last 25 years. During this period, there have been many advances in the development of techniques of analysis of slow waves or spike events generated in the brain, but comparable sophistication has not yet been applied to the behavioral side of the brain-behavior problem. Many investigators have been content to refer to the activities of their experimental animals or human subjects in terms that are not descriptive of behavior at all but appear to refer to unseen “inferred processes” instead. Thus various types of brain electrical activity have been said to be related to perception, information processing, attention, motivation, arousal, emotion, learning, memory, and the like. These terms are notoriously difficult to define and therefore impair communication from one researcher to another. Thus one researcher may say that an animal is “attentive” when it stands motionless with head up and eyes open, suggesting that it is “staring at something.” A second researcher may interpret the word attentive” to mean that the animal is actively interacting with the environment by sniffing, biting, or manipulating objects. As the data summarized here will show, details of actual behavior are important in the study of brain and behavior, and merit careful observation and precise description.