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New Technique Scans Electrical 'Brainscape'

"Our studies suggest that perception is not just a process of analyzing an incoming signal, which is what most textbooks teach and most scientists believe," said Nicolelis. "Rather, perception depends on the internal state of the brain at that given moment of time, and what behavior the animal is using to sample the environment. With this new technique we can monitor such states as attention and expectation and how they modulate how the animal processes that incoming information."

According to Nicolelis, the new results "support a global theory of brain function that holds that all these processes are extremely dynamic. And now with this analytic technique we can measure these dynamics. It gives us a new language of how to describe continuous brain function.

"One of the Holy Grails of neurobiology has been the neural 'code' by which the brain processes information. Now we can say that there is no such thing as a single neural code, because the code is continuously changing according to the internal state of the brain, and according to the strategy the animal selects to search the environment."