At the last annual meeting of the Organization for Computational Neurosciences (OCNS), there was a lot of attention on neural mass and neural field models, the latter of which treat the mammalian cortex as a continuous, excitable medium. These approaches lead to models that comprise nonlinear ODEs or PDEs, space-dependent delays and other challenging aspects of dynamical systems theory. Stefanos Folias gives an overview of recent work in this fast-growing field of research.