, 1996a, Steriade et al., 1996b, Contreras and Steriade, 1997 and Destexhe et al., 1999). Coupling of slow-wave oscillations was found to occur over large distances, even

between widely separate cortical areas, and to involve subcortical regions such as thalamus or striatum (Amzica and Steriade, 1995, Contreras and Steriade, 1997, Destexhe et al., 1999 and Volgushev et al., 2011). Faster cortical oscillations were spatially much more restricted in their coherence (Steriade et al., 1996b and Destexhe et al., 1999), but they were also coupled with ongoing fast rhythms in the thalamus (Steriade et al., 1996a). Interestingly, coherence of slow rhythms was temporally sustained, while coupling of beta and gamma activity strongly fluctuated over time (Destexhe

et al., 1999). Importantly, coupling in all frequency bands could occur with phase lags close to zero (Steriade et al., 1996b and Contreras http://www.selleckchem.com/products/Adriamycin.html and Steriade, 1997). Optical imaging studies using voltage-sensitive dyes produced similar results, revealing large-scale spatial Tariquidar order coupling of ongoing oscillations that was particularly widespread for low frequencies (Arieli et al., 1996). A study of ICMs in the visual cortex of awake monkeys (Leopold et al., 2003) investigated coupling both for the phase of ongoing oscillations and for their amplitude envelopes (cf. Figure 2B). Across the array of implanted electrodes, phase coupling decreased with increasing spatial separation and was inversely Guanylate kinase related to the frequency. Interestingly, a different pattern was revealed for the amplitude envelope correlations. Envelopes showed predominantly slow correlations (<0.1 Hz), which achieved very high values even over large distances (Leopold et al., 2003). This was particularly true for the amplitude envelopes of gamma-band oscillations that, in terms of their phase, showed much weaker coupling

across distance. This seems interesting because states of global synchronization in the brain are typically associated with lower frequencies such as slow-wave oscillations or delta or alpha waves (Destexhe et al., 1999 and Supp et al., 2011). In the human brain, resting state dynamics has been explored using EEG or MEG mainly in the context of neuropsychiatric disorders (see below) and studies focusing on phase or envelope ICMs using these methods in the healthy brain have remained scarce. Envelope ICMs have been studied using intracranial recordings during presurgical clinical testing in epilepsy patients (Nir et al., 2008, He et al., 2008, Jerbi et al., 2010 and Keller et al., 2013). Simultaneous recordings of unit activity and LFPs from left and right auditory cortex revealed strongly correlated fluctuations of firing rate and LFP power envelopes across the hemispheres (Nir et al., 2008).