ABSTRACT
This chapter presents concepts necessary to understand the brain as a system. It summarizes the physiology of the brain relevant to epilepsy. The chapter concentrates on the measurement and analysis of this brain activity. It also summarizes how physiology and measurement can be turned into a mathematical model of brain dynamics. The chapter discusses how the presence of stochastic elements affects electroen-cephalogram sources, measurement, analysis and modeling. Epilepsy is a problem of scale. On the one hand it is a macro-scopic phenomenon that encompasses a large portion if not the whole of the brain. On the other hand, epilepsy’s root cause must be found in the chemokinetic processes that may be associated with meso- or micro-scopic cellular biology. Epilepsy is often treated as a special case easier to model than an entire brain because it is a state in which a large population of neurons behave similarly, thus simplifying the problem.
