Independence: a new criterion for the analysis of the electromagnetic fields in the global brain?

The impressive increase in the understanding of some basic processing in th e human brain has recently led to the formulation of efficient computationa l methods, which when applied in the design of better signal processing too ls, provides a deeper and clearer view to study the functioning of the huma n brain. The recently developed independent component analysis (ICA) has been shown to be an efficient tool fur artifact identification and extraction from ele ctroencephalographic and magnetoencephalographic recordings. In addition, I CA has been applied to the analysis of brain signals evoked by sensory stim uli. Extensions of the basic ICA methodology have also been employed to rev eal otherwise hidden information. This paper reviews our recent results in this field. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.