Although neuroimaging methods, such as structural/functional MRI and PET have many advantages, including a higher level of spatial resolution, they offer relatively poor temporal resolution compared to electrophysiological methods, which offer excellent temporal resolution in the millisecond range [29,30]. This ability to record millisecond-by-millisecond brain signals with electrophysiological techniques is crucial for the understanding of subtle sensory/cognitive processing as they are occurring in the brain. Electrophysiological techniques have further advantages of being non-invasive, relatively inexpensive to implement, and can be used to study a large variety of cognitive processes/brain functions; recently developed electrophysiological analytical techniques and methods allow for a better study of neural communication across different brain regions in normal [31-33] as well as pathological conditions [34-38], and provide subtle measures of neurocognitive (dys) function. More recent studies increasingly use localization techniques such as standardized low resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) to characterize specific activity patterns and communication across brain regions three-dimensionally and these methods have been implemented in many psychiatric disorders including alcoholism [9-11,39,40].
