Sources of linear and non-linear synchrony between brain and muscles: linear and non-linear CMC sources

Abstract

This manuscript shows that it is possible to find distinct sources of brain activity, at similar frequencies, arising from linear and non-linear interactions of the brain with the muscular system. Those sources were obtained by maximizing coherence between multivariate signals recorded from brain and a single channel from the muscles. To find linear phase synchrony we used unrectified electromyographic recordings, whereas to de-mix nonlinear sources, we used rectified muscular measurements. In order to obtain the brain sources, we employed a recently published method called 'cacoh' that is able to maximize coherence over the complete frequency range of interest and simultaneously find patterns of sources for each them. Our results show that cortico-muscular interactions even at the same frequency range can have spatially distinct neuronal sources depending on whether interactions had linear or non-linear character.