Avgis Hadjipapas, Associate Professor for Neuroscience, Charalambos Charalambous , Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Neuroscience at the University of Nicosia Medical School and Mark Roberts , Associate Professor in Neuroscience, Maastricht University, the Netherlands, have launched a new research topic for a special issue in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.
This research topic aims to collect international contributions highlighting the role of the precise frequency of rhythmic neuronal/brain activity in health and disease. Neurons in the brain cooperate by synchronizing or desynchronizing their rhythmic activities in a complex manner. These synchronization phenomena in the brain are likely to obey universal laws that govern synchronization in physical systems, which have been already intensely studied and are meanwhile established. These laws state that the precise frequency of rhythmic activity has profound consequences for synchronization and the appearance of order in complex physical and engineering systems. It is therefore highly likely that the precise frequency of brain rhythms has similarly significant implications for the cooperation of neurons within the brain and the ensuing brain self-organization. In fact, it is meanwhile established that synchronization and rhythmic activity are exploited by several computational mechanisms in the brain.
This research topic aims to shed light on the role of exact frequency in the function of the brain by combining insights from electrical recordings from the living brain where rhythmic activities with exact frequencies are expressed, experiments where neurons or brain areas are stimulated with exact frequencies, but also from relevant theoretical and computational work in models of neuronal networks. The ultimate aim of the topic is to contribute to the understanding of the role of synchronization in health but also eventually, its’ role in the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric diseases.