UC Berkeley

Freeman's Mass Action (FMA) refers to the collective synaptic actions that neurons in the cortex exert on each other in vast numbers by synchronizing their firing of action potentials. In the aggregate, FMA is a powerful force that creates bursts of cortical neural activity that resemble the vortices of tornadoes and hurricanes. The bursts rapidly and repeatedly retrieve memories and bind them with sensory information into percepts. In this way, FMA expresses and transmits the meaning of sensory information in spatial patterns of cortical activity that resemble frames in a movie.