The functional significance of spontaneous brain activity
 
Andreas Kleinschmidt
University of Geneva

Much of neuroscience research in the past century has been conducted in a behaviorist stance. With the 
renewed recent interest in ongoing activity constructivist accounts of brain function are seeing a 
renaissance. I will illustrate several examples illustrating the influence of ongoing activity variations on 
evoked responses and perceptual performance. Overall, these observations are comfortably accounted 
for in predictive coding and related frameworks as the free energy principle introduced by Karl Friston. 
As a by-product, these observations invalidate basic assumptions underpinning analytical techniques as 
the widely used general linear model. Finally, I will focus on the most salient type of ongoing human 
brain activity, near 10 Hz or alpha oscillations and speculate on their role as a neural windshield wiper.