New perspectives in pharmaco-electroencephalography

Recent research emphasizes that majority of brain disorders and psychiatric problems are accompanied by disruption in the temporal structure of brain activity. From this perspective, disruption is viewed as a disorder of the metastable balance between large-scale integration and independent processing in the brain, in favor of either independent or hyper-ordered processing. This paper proposes that the future of psychopharmacology lies in its ability to design the psychotropic drugs which can restore the normal temporal structure and metastable structure of brain activity. Quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) is one of the key complex technologies utilized in psychopharmacology for this purpose. However, conventional approaches for EEG analysis used in clinical practice are not suitable for studying temporal structure of brain activity. To overcome this limitation, and in order to reveal dynamic and temporal characteristics of brain activity, the advanced analysis of EEG micro-structure should be used.