Neural mechanisms of visual imagery-beyond the classical functional localization theory

Abstract

For the past half century, neuroscience has greatly advanced by parcellating the brain into many functionally distinct areas and by decomposing the neural circuit into neurons and genotypes. However, reduction approaches to correlate human intellects with neural elements (brain areas, neurons, or genes) have limitations, since signal/information flow in the cerebral cortex, an ultimate complex system, is dynamic, hierarchical and distributed. We have been exploring an alternative approach to capture spatiotemporal dynamics of signals propagation and interactions underlying visual categorization and memory along the distributed cortical neural network using a flexible "mesh" electrocorticographic probe. Our research aims to revise the functional localization theory, accounting for the non-linear, parallel-distributed, and dynamic nature of the cortical processing.