Intention and consciousness in mesoscopic brain dynamics

Brain systems operate on many levels of organization, each with its own scales of time and space. Dynamics is applicable to every level, from the atomic to the molecular, and from macromolecular organelles to the neurons into which they are incorporated. In turn the neurons form populations, these form the subassemblies and systems, and so on up to embodied brains interacting purposively with material, interpersonal, and politicosocial environments. Each level is "macroscopic" to the one below it and microscopic" to the one above it. Among the most difficult tasks that scientists face are those of conceiving and describing the exchanges between levels, seeing that the measures of time and distance are incommensurate, and that causal inference is far more ambiguous between than within levels. That holds for the relation between neuron functions observed with microelectrodes and whole brain functions observed with. fMRI and PET. A new recourse is to conceive, identify and model an intervening "mesoscopic" level, which is a local self-organizing neural population. Its characteristic activities consist of steady-state, uncorrelated, background action potentials and EEG dendritic activity, revealing self-organizing chaotic patterns of gamma activity as spatially distributed amplitude-modulation (AM) of aperiodic, spatially coherent carrier waves.