Abstract

Human communication relies on quasi-rhythmic signals such as speech and face movements. In addition, the visual system also samples the environment in a quasi-rhythmic way. I will show examples of rhythmicity in sensory sampling and discuss how this relates to brain oscillations. Specifically, brain oscillations seems to match the dominant spectral structure of relevant sensory stimuli. This is potentially relevant because low-frequency brain oscillations represent changes in excitability of neural populations. I will demonstrate that phase resetting is a potentially powerful mechanism for coding of sensory information and for aligning temporal windows of high neural excitability to salient events in sensory stimuli. Short Biography Joachim Gross is Professor of Systems Neuroscience, Acting Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator. His group investigates the functional role of brain oscillations using Neuroimaging and computational methods. His main goal is to understand how brain oscillations support perception and action. He obtained his M.Sc in Physics and Mathematics in San Angelo, USA in 1993 and his degree in Physics in Hannover, Germany in 1995. He was Ph.D. student at the Institute of Medicine, Research Center Juelich and the MPI for Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig. In 1998 he started working as a PostDoc in the Clinic of Neurology at the University of Duesseldorf on pathological oscillatory brain processes in movement disorders and pain. In 2006 he was appointed Professor at Glasgow University. His method of choice is magnetoencephalography (MEG).