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Comments by Professor Kazuo Sasaki
As expected from the title of this Symposium, the majority of the presentations were on studies of the cerebral cortex by means of electromagnetic recordings, most of them using MEG and a few employing functional MRI. Many of the papers were, as far as I understood, of high level in ideas and results, and some of them were excellent. I do not want to comment on individual papers.
I was impressed by the extensive and ambitious MEG explorations in clinical studies, presented by Dr. Jeffrey Lewine of the University of Utah. In particular, his work in clarifying the pathogenesis of autism and its neurosurgical treatment seemed to indicate a new field for MEG applications in clinical use. Autism is a complex of various clinical disorders, but their investigation revealed advantageous characteristics of MEG as a non-invasive tool for examination of patients.
The lecture of Professor Teuvo Kohonen was very stimulating to all of us. Visiting his laboratory and talking with him and with some young researchers in his group was pleasant and fruitful for me.
The number of researchers using MEG has increased considerably in different fields during the last several years. This is surely fine and welcome. But some of the studies seem weak in their basic knowledge of neurophysiology or electromagnetics, or both.
Finally I would like to mention that a large and promising MEG machine was demonstrated to be ready in Helsinki.
