Cortical Call Out: The Brain's Electric Field Creates a Feedback Loop That Synchronizes Neural Activity: Scientific American

Cortical Call Out: The Brain's Electric Field Creates a Feedback Loop That Synchronizes Neural Activity: Scientific American: "Not only did the researchers show that this positive feedback facilitated the synchronous slow waves of electrical activity in the slice of ferret brain, they also showed that an electric field of the same strength, but opposite polarity, disrupted its synchronous neural activity. In other words, they showed that they could break the amplifying feedback loop with negative feedback. "Adding a positive feedback loop on top of what the slice produces itself increased synchronization," Paulsen explains, "but the clever bit was to demonstrate that negative feedback reduces synchronization. To me, it's the negative feedback experiment that is important here, and that really demonstrates that the endogenous [internally generated] fields are contributing to the synchronization.""