Hughes and Crunelli (2007) and Buzsaki (2006) review how action potentials occur when neurons are in-phase with respect to the local field potentials (LFPs) and how action potentials are suppressed when neurons are shifted anti-phase with respect to the LFP where phase shift is a high speed switch for large collections of neurons to functionally synchronize with sub-sets of neurons in different network nodes in the millisecond time domain. The human EEG is the summation of LFPs arising from pyramidal neuron synapses. The process of phase shift and phase lock of the EEG between different scalp locations has been shown to be correlated with a range of functional conditions. For example, measures of EEG phase reset (PR) have been correlated to various frequency bands during cognitive tasks (Tesche and Karhu, 2000; Kirschfeld, 2005; Kahana, 2006), working memory (John, 1968; Damasio, 1989; Tallon-Baudry et al., 2001; Rizzuto et al., 2003), sensory-motor interactions (Vaadia et al., 1995; Roelfsema et al., 1997), hippocampal long-term potentiation (McCartney et al., 2004), brain development (Thatcher et al., 2008b), autism (Thatcher et al., 2009b), and consciousness (Varela et al., 2001; John, 2002, 2005; Cosmelli et al., 2004).
