Identifying the synaptic origin of ongoing neuronal oscillations through spatial discrimination of electric fields

Although intracerebral field potential oscillations are commonly used to study information processing during cognition and behavior, the cellular and network processes underlying such events remain unclear. The limited spatial resolution of standard single-point recordings does not clarify whether field oscillations reflect the activity of one or many afferent presynaptic populations. However, multi-site recording devices now provide high-resolution spatial profiles of local field potentials (LFPs) and when coupled to modern mathematical analyses that discriminate signals with distinct but overlapping spatial distributions, they open the door to better understand these potentials. Here we review recent insights that help disentangle certain pathway-specific activities. Accordingly, some oscillatory patterns can now be viewed as a periodic succession of synchronous synaptic currents that reflect the time envelope of spiking activity in given presynaptic populations. These analyses modify our concept of brain rhythms as abstract entities, molding them into mechanistic representations of network activity and allowing us to work in the time domain, reducing the loss of information inherent to data-chopping frequency treatment.