Oscillatory Synchrony

From a neural point of view, building a coherent percept can be compared to a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle are the bits of sensory information that are scattered in different sensory areas: the color of an object, for instance, is analyzed in one brain region, and its motion in another one. But how are these pieces put back together again to form the coherent percept we experience? This problem, also known as the feature binding problem, could be solved by oscillatory synchrony: All neurons dealing with the same perceptual object would synchronize their firing on an oscillatory mode—in other words, alternate collectively between epochs of activity and rest—much as a group of drummers would follow a given rhythm. In this view, the ...