The research suggests new experimental approaches to studying the mind-body problem, while at a practical level it has implications for dementing and psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, that somehow disrupt the process of useful thought. These oscillations have been detected in everything from the olfactory bulb of rabbits to the visual cortex of cats and even conscious humans. IBM, Birmingham and Saint Mary's researchers now believe they have explained not only how the oscillations come about but how the oscillatory rhythm is communicated from one area of the brain to another. These two findings are critical to understanding how the complex electric signals of large numbers of nerve cells generate awareness and perhaps even consciousness. At the heart of the binding problem is how the brain processes its perception of objects.
Most people have no difficulty identifying objects such as a tennis ball flying through the air.
In 1989, Gray and Singer in Germany detected the rhythm in the visual cortex of cats, and noticed that not only were these oscillations tightly synchronized over a large part of the brain, but they appeared strongest when the cat was looking at a single object, and weakest or non-existent when the cat was looking at different and unrelated objects. No less a biological luminary than the Nobel Laureate Francis Crick has suggested that this synchronized firing of nerve cells was used by the brain not only as a means of focusing attention, but as the general mechanism of consciousness. What's more, the researchers showed that repetitive stimulation to the interneuron network would prompt the elicit 40 Hertz oscillations. This finding arose from laboratory work on fresh hippocampal brain tissue done by Jefferys and Whittington and computer simulations of networks of neurons constructed on an IBM SP supercomputer by Traub, a research staff member at IBM in New York. Their proposal is that the inhibitory network receives a steady or slow excitatory drive which makes it oscillate, and that provides a clock which determines when pyramidal cells can fire.