Electroencephalography (EEG) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) are two non-invasive techniques formeasuring (part of) the electrical activity of the brain. While EEG is an old technique (Hans Berger, a germanneuropsychiatrist, measured the first human EEG in 1929), MEG is a rather new one: the first measures of themagnetic field generated by the electrophysiological activity of the brain have been done in 1968 at MIT byD. Cohen. Nowadays, EEG is relatively inexpensive and used commonly to detect and qualify neural activities(epilepsy detection and characterisation, neural disorder qualification, BCI, ...). MEG is, comparatively, muchmore expensive as SQUIDS work in very challenging conditions (at liquid helium temperature) and as aspecially shielded room must be used to separate the signal of interest from the ambient noise. However, asit reveals a complementary vision to that of EEG and as it is less sensitive to the head structure, it also bearsgreat hopes and more and more MEG machines are installed throughout the world. INRIA and Odyssée haveparticipated to the acquisition of one such machine that has just been installed in the hospital "La Timone" inMarseille, see 2.2 above.MEG and EEG can be measured simultaneously (M/EEG) and reveal complementary properties of theelectrical fields. The two techniques have temporal resolutions of about the millisecond, which is the typicalgranularity of the measurable electrical phenomenons that arise in the brain. This high temporal resolutionis what makes MEG and EEG attractive for the functionnal study of the brain. The spatial resolution, on thecontrary, is somewhat poor as only a few hundreds of simultaneous data points can be acquired simultaneously(about 300-400 for MEG and up to 256 for EEG). MEG and EEG are somewhat complementary with fMRIand SPECT in that those provide a very good spatial resolution but a rather poor temporal one (about thesecond for fMRI and the minute for SPECT). Contrarily to fMRI, which “only” measures an haemodynamicresponse linked to the metabolic demand, MEG and EEG also measure a direct consequence of the electricalactivity of the brain: it is admitted that the MEG and EEG measured signals correspond to the variations ofthe post-synaptic potentials of the pyramidal cells in the cortex. Pyramidal neurons compose approximately80% of the neurons of the cortex, and it requires at least about 50,000 active such neurons to generate somemeasurable signal.While the few hundreds of temporal curves obtained using M/EEG have a clear clinical interest, they onlyprovide partial information on the localisation of the sources of the activity (as the measurements are made onor outside of the head). Thus the practical use of M/EEG data raises various problems that are at the core ofthe Odyssée research in this topic:• First, as acquisition is continuous and at upto 1kHz rate, the amount of data for each experiment ishuge. Data selection and reduction (finding the interesting time instants or interesting frequencies)and pre-processing (removing artifacts, enhancing the signal to noise ratio, ...) is currently largelydone manually. Making a better and more systematic use of the measurements is an important stepto optimally exploit the M/EEG data [4].• With a proper model of the head and of the sources of brain electromagnetic activity, it is possibleto simulate the electrical propagation and reconstruct sources that can explain the measured signal.Proposing better models [12], [9] and means to calibrate them [16] so as to have better reconstructions are other important aims of our work.• Finally, it is our goal to exploit the temporal resolution of M/EEG and apply the various methods wedevelopped to better understand some aspects of the brain functioning, and/or to extract more subtleinformation out of the measurements. This is interesting not only as a cognitive goal, but also servesthe purpose of the validation of our algorithms and can lead to the use of such methods in the fieldof Brain Computer Interfaces. To be able to conduct such kind of experiments, an EEG lab is beingset up at Odyssée.