Understanding the Importance of Oscillation Events: Methods, Characteristics, and their Role in Information Coding

This article collection explores the dynamic nature of neural oscillations, their measurement, and their implications for both normal brain function and psychiatric disorders. The first study investigates increased spontaneous gamma activity in the auditory cortex of individuals with schizophrenia, revealing that this phenomenon is primarily driven by enhanced power within gamma bursts rather than a tonic elevation of gamma activity or changes in spectral slope; this suggests a link between abnormal gamma burst power and psychotic symptoms. The second study delves into oscillatory neuronal networks and highlights the concept of "coupling resonance," demonstrating frequency-dependent electrical properties in neuron pairs, and elucidating how resonance in membrane potentials and coupling conductance can impact network synchronization. The third study addresses methodological advancements, introducing innovative techniques to detect and precisely delineate transient bursts of brain oscillations (“packets”) in the time-frequency domain, thereby offering superior analysis tools for understanding the dynamic synchronization of neural activity. Collectively, these abstracts underscore the importance of oscillatory bursts and neural resonance phenomena in both the manifestation of neurological symptoms and the foundational mechanisms of neural communication, while also emphasizing the need for sophisticated analytical approaches to capturing the complexity of these brain dynamics.
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Neuronal oscillations reflect synchronized excitability fluctuations in ensembles of neurons that can be observed in electrophysiological recordings in the presence or absence of an external stimulus. Neuronal oscillations have been proposed to underlie many critical brain operations including attentional selection of sensory input, parsing/chunking of complex input streams, generation of motor output, memory encoding and retrieval, ordering of information carried by spike trains through spike-phase coding and temporal coupling of distant ensembles to enhance information transfer. Key to their mechanistic role in these operations is the idea that neuronal oscillations in a particular frequency synchronize dynamically to couple a group of neurons into a cell assembly for a specific brain task, and then just as dynamically desynchronize so that neurons can regroup for the next brain task.

Oscillatory brain activity has been viewed as sustained increase in power at specific frequency bands. However, this perspective has been challenged in recent years by the notion that oscillations may occur as transient burst-like events that occur in individual trials and may only appear as sustained activity when multiple trials are averaged together.

Our goal is to examine the idea that oscillatory activity can manifest as a transient burst as well as a sustained increase in power. We tackle the technical challenges involved in the detection and characterization of transient oscillation events, the mechanisms that might generate them and the information that may be extracted from them to study single-trial dynamics of neuronal ensemble activity.

This Research Topic seeks contributions from researchers working in different disciplines, which will shed light on the importance of studying the role of oscillation events in ongoing recordings or at the single-trial level. The manuscripts may include, but not limited to mechanisms of oscillation events generation, methods for detection and characterization of oscillatory activity, findings relating oscillation events to behavior, computational models and clinical cases.

Topic Editor Idan Tal is affiliated with Synchron. All other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regards to the Research Topic subjec

Keywords: Oscillations, transients, bursts, timing, single trial, methods, systems neuroscience

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.