ABSTRACT

The mammalian cerebral cortex is a vast network of interconnecting neurones, in which about 89% of synaptic links are excitatory (Braitenberg and Schüz, 1991, 1998). The view is gaining increasing support that the basic principle for functional organization of the cerebral cortex is the cell assembly (or neural assembly). This concept was first advanced by Hebb (1949) and has been developed in many ways subsequently (Braitenberg, 1978; Palm, 1982; Miller, 1991, 1996a,b,c; Miller and Wickens, 1991; Sakurai, 1996; Wickens and Miller, 1997).