At what time scale does the nervous system operate?

A novel statistical strategy, the spike jitter method, was developed to assess temporal structure in spike trains from neuronal ensembles. Its key feature is the introduction of a null hypothesis that assumes a uniform relative likelihood of observing a spike at one temporal location versus another within a small temporal window. We applied the method to simultaneously recorded motor cortical neurons in behaving monkeys and examined the occurrence of finely timed synchrony between neuron pairs. Evidence was found for millisecond synchrony that could only be accounted for by assuming fine temporal structure in the constituent neurons' spike trains. The method was also applied to higher-order patterns. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.