Abstract

Neural oscillations, which appear in several areas of the nervous system and cover a wide frequency range, are a prominent issue in current neuroscience. Extracellularly recorded oscillations are generally thought to be a manifestation of a neural population with synchronized electrical activity resulting from coupling mechanisms. The vertebrate olfactory neuroepithelium exhibits β-band oscillations, termed peripheral waves (PWs), in their population response to odor stimulation. Here, we examine PWs in the channel catfish and propose that their properties could be explained as the superposition of asynchronous oscillators. Our model shows that the intriguing random pattern of amplitude-modulated PWs could be explained by Rayleigh fading, an interference phenomenon well known in physics and recognizable using statistical methods and signal analysis. We are proposing a mathematical fingerprint to characterize neural signals generated by the addition of random phase oscillators. Our interpretation of PWs as arising from asynchronous oscillators could be generalized to other neuronal populations, because it suggests that neural oscillations, detected in local field potential recordings within a narrow frequency band, do not necessarily originate from synchronization events. Copyright © 2007 Society for Neuroscience.