Notice that the thalamus sends projections to and receives input from almost the entire cortex, and thus provides a necessary anatomical substrate. More precisely, they suggested that the thalamus play the role of synchronizing cortical oscillations. Another view is that synchronous oscillations are generated by lateral connections within the visual cortex. As summarized above, recent advances on understanding synchronous properties of oscillator networks have firmly established the theoretical legitimacy of this view. Although structurally similar to the comparator model of Kammen et al.
Rapid synchrony occurs regardless of the global inhibitor.
Since both the comparator and the global inhibitor are implicated to be located in the thalamus, the disputes may be settled by the following experiment. The prediction implies that if the visual cortex shows 40 Hz oscillations then the thalamus oscillates with a frequency of 80 Hz. In contrast, the comparator model assumes that the feedback loop between the thalamus and the cortex produces synchrony, and thus would predict that the thalamus oscillates with the same frequency as the visual cortex. The presence of two objects is a critical condition. Otherwise both models predict the same frequency of the oscillations in the visual cortex and the thalamus.