Neural messages are only as useful as their readability. Complex assembly sequences acquire meaning only through appropriate reader mechanisms, which can reliably differentiate among the multiple overlapping sequence patterns. While establishing a correlation between various sensory inputs and firing patterns is an important step in brain research, the biological relevance of these statistics-derived ‘representations’ can be verified only through some actuator mechanism. Multiple time-integrator (reader) mechanisms exist in the brain; each with a characteristic temporal window, and integrators with longer time constants can combine neural assemblies into long sequences. Different reader mechanisms may simultaneously monitor the activity of the same assembly patterns and may extract different types of meanings, for example temporal relationships for one feature and spiking intensity for another (Hirase et al., 1999; Huxter et al., 2003; Konishi 1990; Niessing and Friedrich, 2010).
