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Comments by Professor Riitta Hari
The program of the meeting was focused on temporal aspects of signal processing in the human brain. This topic was considered important as a counterpart for the multitude of localization-type human studies which have emerged with the recent development of positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonace imaging (fMRI) methods. Since a few thousand fMRI devices are available all over the world, it is expected that the localization-type approach will dominate human brain research in the near future.However, timing is quintessential for many types of brain functions. For example, audition and motor control require very accurate timing. All electrophysiological techniques have excellent temporal resolution and thus can reveal sequential activation of cells and cell groups. At the macroscopic level, temporal brain processing can be studied by means of electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Because of the long-lasting interest of the LTL in MEG recordings, 9 out of the 21 contributions were related to MEG.
The presentations nicely demonstrated the importance of temporal aspects of cerebral signal processing for audition, somatosensation, vision, memory, motor control, intermodal interaction, and language. All talks were followed by intensive discussion, stimulating all participants.