| The phenomenon of traveling electrical waves within the central nervous system of humans and animals is an intriguing area of research, and its biological and physical bases have been unknown since the 1950s. The first experimental descriptions of this phenomenon in the brain have been mostly qualitative, and for this reason little is known about their functional role in sensory, motor, or cognitive processes. The purpose of the present study was to introduce a new method, based on the center of mass algorithm, to quantify the trajectory patterns, velocity, and other phenomenological observables as the "momentum", "force" and the "energy" of the traveling electrical waves in the central nervous system. Here, we show the first formal description related to the neurodynamics of the center of mass for traveling electrical waves in the central nervous system. We show results of this analysis for the traveling electrical waves in the human electroencephalogram during sensory and cognitive tasks and for the electrical field potentials of the cat spinal cord during a rhythmic motor task. Our results suggest that the traveling electrical waves within the central nervous system may represent the collective electrical response of neurons activated in a spatio-temporal sequence related with physiological processes. Because the electrical activity of neurons is noisy in nature, we suggest that our study could be useful in future studies to understand the impact of the neuronal noise on the traveling electrical waves in the brain and the spinal cord in different functional contexts. |
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