g., Hatsopoulos and Donoghue, 2009) not only to compensate for the deficits and retrain lesioned brain and bodies, but also, once noninvasive techniques are further developed, to augment the capability of intact brains. The potential ethical and social implications of such capabilities should not escape our notice. We are grateful to present and past Panobinostat molecular weight students for many discussions about these issues. Y.D.’s research is supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation (grant 51/11). R.G.M.M.’s research is supported by the European

Research Council. “
“Vertebrate brains are among the most sophisticated scalable architectures in nature. Scalability refers to a property that allows the system to grow and perform ABT-737 price the same desired computations, often with increased efficacy. In scalable systems, certain aspects of the system must be constrained if the same computational goals are to be achieved in the face of increasing organismal complexity. In this essay, we submit that temporal organization of neuronal activity, represented

by the system of rhythms, is one of the fundamental constraints in scaling brain size. When Neuron got its start 25 years ago, the study of neuronal oscillations was largely confined to clinical electroencephalography, invertebrate physiology, sleep research, and a few laboratories devoted to the study of the relationships between specific local-field-potential rhythms and behavior or perceptual processes. Today, the study of brain rhythms is an intertwined part of systems neuroscience Levetiracetam and among its fastest growing fields. This shift is largely due to the recognition that the multifarious

rhythms of the brain form a hierarchical system that offers a syntactical structure for the spike traffic within and across circuits at multiple time scales. The constellation of network rhythms is characteristic of individual brains, and their alterations invariably lead to mental and neurological disease. In today’s world of the “connectome,” it is worth reiterating that network oscillations are among the most conservatively preserved phenotypes in mammalian evolution. What are the structural and physiological solutions that allow the preservation of the syntactical rules of spike communication in the face of rapidly growing brain size? Answering this question is among the most critical in neuroscience and amounts to an understanding of the neuronal “code. Brains, small and large, are predictive devices that exploit regularity and recurrence as a fundamental property of the surrounding world and apply effective heuristics acquired through phylogenetic and individual experience for problem solving. The brain’s ability to work both as a subsumption and as a prediction device relies on a set of complex properties, including self-organized information retention and local-global integration.