This is page is an unedited draft from Marcello’s manuscript. It needs citations, figures, cross-links, and other work to be done. It will take a while!
It is here so you can see the general gist of Marcello’s argument across the whole essay.
Feel free to visit from time to time for updates.
Epilepsy is a disease whereby large areas of cortex show rhythmic activity often generating bodily contractions (seizures) and associated with loss of consciousness.
During epileptic periods in humans travelling and spiral waves have been recorded using a microelectrode array.
Similar states of high synchrony of cortical activity underly experimental epileptic states in mice.
In these experiments after cortical connections with contralateral side and brainstem were interrupted, epileptic EEG events recorded by 15-32 extracellular electrodes did travel across the cortex as slow waves of neural electrical activity of about 7.5 Hz.
These observations indicate that during epileptic seizures there is significant spatio-temporal synchronisation of slow brain waves which propagate across the cortex and that these are associated with rhythmic muscle contractions. Interestingly these rhythmic contractions have frequencies like the oscillations which underlie locomotion.