Finally, interventional approaches with requisite temporal and spatial specificity must be utilized to perturb communication between brain regions during specific physiological patterns. Recent studies have shown that disrupting anatomical connections between the hippocampus and PFC leads to deficits in spatial navigation and memory [30,38], but in order to link network patterns to certain aspects of cognition, real-time detection of these patterns must be coupled with temporally precise methods of perturbing network activity. Combining these two methods would result in a closed loop feedback paradigm, which can detect, for example, incidences of SWR events, specific oscillation phase, or bouts of high coherence between two interacting regions (Figure 3). The feasibility of such an approach has been demonstrated for network patterns within the hippocampus [56,71]. A more stringent procedure would be to perturb oscillatory coherence without disrupting the overall activity of the cells. This would require independent methods such as perturbing neuromodulation to change oscillatory frequency in a particular region, which still represents a major technical challenge.
