Concept
Oscillation
A signal that repeats because a system feeds back on itself with gain and delay — the oscillator an engineer designs on purpose, and the rhythms a nervous system produces whether anyone asked or not.
From the EE side
From the neuro side
Every oscillator is a feedback loop with enough gain and the right delay. A circuit designer usually wants exactly one of them, and an analog designer’s recurring problem is getting one by accident. Nervous systems are full of them, and a growing share of what is done to the brain with electricity is timed against them.
Nearby concepts
All topics under Oscillation
- Responsive neurostimulation 2013 A skull-mounted implant that reads the cortex at a seizure focus and stimulates it when a detector fires — closed-loop brain stimulation, approved in the US in 2013.
- Magnetoencephalography 1972 Measuring the brain's magnetic field, a billionth to a hundred-millionth of the Earth's, times cortical currents to the millisecond through a skull that barely distorts them.
- Central pattern generators 1911 Neural circuits that produce the rhythms of walking, swimming, flying and breathing from an input with no rhythm in it, leaving sensory feedback to adjust the pattern rather than create it.