
doi: 10.5772/31004
Ranging from its most basic mechanisms to the clinical symptoms, epilepsy is tightly associated with the word “synchronization”. In fact, synchronization phenomena underlying epilepsy are described in several mechanisms at different temporal and spatial scales. At the lowest spatial scale, hippocampal and neocortical interictal spikes appear as the result of synchronized activity of pyramidal cells. At a larger spatial scale, epileptic seizures are usually described as a state of "hypersynchrony" encompassing extended cortical areas. Synchronization and epilepsy are so associated one to each other that lack of synchronization, or desynchronization, has been highlighted in recent years as a key aspect of the underlying dynamic in this pathology. The word synchronization comes from two Greek words, chronos) and (same), which means "sharing the same time"; therefore, a synchronized event is always composed by the temporal coincidence of two or more actions. However, it is usually understood the existence of an underlying mechanism that cause the synchronization itself. In this sense, synchronization is assumed differently from chance, because no deterministic causal effect exists in the last one. On the other hand, the use of the word synchronization is generally associated with a mechanism, known or not, that makes possible the temporal coincidence. In the above sense, and from the very beginning of epilepsy research, the word synchronization is found in many aspects of this pathology. Every time we found the word synchronization in epilepsy, one is tempted to think in a pathological substrate that would make it possible. However, it seems that synchronization in epilepsy has suffered from bifurcating routes since the beginnings of the quantitative descriptions of epileptic phenomena. The very clever and insightful descriptions made by the epilepsy researches in the late 40's and 50's (Penfield & Jasper, 1954) were plagued by the words synchronization and hypersynchronization, and today they are still used almost in the same fashion that were originally used. However, since the first description of the synchronization phenomena by Christian Huygens in 1673 to nowdays, there has been a profound revision and enlargement of the concept of synchronization especially in the last years (Pikovsky et al., 2001). Chaos theory, complex networks methodologies and nonlinear time series analysis have dug into the traditional concept of synchronization with the net result of a completely new proposal of what synchronization actually is. Today, in fact, there is no more a single synchronization phenomena, but instead, the traditional term has been split in several, more specific terms to characterize the numerous forms of the underlying mechanism but also, of the different kind of synchronized objects. It seems that the new understanding we have today of
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