There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
At any one moment, many neuronal groups in our brain are active. Microelectrode recordings
have characterized the activation of single neurons and fMRI has unveiled brain-wide
activation patterns. Now it is time to understand how the many active neuronal groups
interact with each other and how their communication is flexibly modulated to bring
about our cognitive dynamics. I hypothesize that neuronal communication is mechanistically
subserved by neuronal coherence. Activated neuronal groups oscillate and thereby undergo
rhythmic excitability fluctuations that produce temporal windows for communication.
Only coherently oscillating neuronal groups can interact effectively, because their
communication windows for input and for output are open at the same times. Thus, a
flexible pattern of coherence defines a flexible communication structure, which subserves
our cognitive flexibility.