Figure 5. Narrowing the focus of coordination dynamics across scales of observation.

(A) illustrates three levels of recording of oscillatory activity: the hypothetical recording of individual neurons (left), local population recording of multiple neurons, for instance as Local Field Potentials (LFP) or intracranial EEG (iEEG)(center) and the global activity captured for instance with high density magnetic (MEG) or electric (EEG) sensor arrays (right). At each upper spatial scale, only the orderly most aspects of neural organization from the lower scale are observable. An example is outlined in figure 5B: when patterns have misaligned phase relationships (left columns), their population signal cancels (middle column) and disappears from the upper scales. The result resembles a state transition regime, although it is more plausible that a single spatiotemporally metastable regime without state transitions spans the entire episode.