Cerebral Slow Waves and Time Parsing

Abstract

Cerebral compound field potentials, observed as either the electroencephalogram (EEG) or stimulus-synchronized event related brain potentials (ERBP), have received thirty years of experimental study as possible indicators of general brain state or of sensorimotor information processing respectively. They have received relatively little attention in the context of subjective awareness of a undirectional dimension of time, and then mainly in relation to nonhuman sensorimotor rhythms and hippocampal theta waves. This report is a pilot study of human EEG and ERBP during subjective familiarization with simple motor-sensory temporal patterns, using both small-averaged and unaveraged time series of the traditional theta-alpha-heta band and computer-unaided, human recognition of temporal patterns in the cerebral slow waves. The data support experimental use of more sophisticated methods to analyze possible time-parsing functions of primate extracellular field oscillations.

Key Words:

• EEG
• evoked potentials
• time-series
• subjective time