in these oscillations was largely motivated by the finding that following an appropriate visual stimulus, local field potential (LFP) recordings in the cat primary visual cortex (i.e. V1) can exhibit robust oscillations at around 40 Hz (i.e. in the γ band) that are tightly phased-related to local neuronal firing (Gray and Singer 1989). During these oscillations neurons with overlapping receptive fields and similar response characteristics were found to be synchronized with zero time-lag which suggested that γ activity may provide a means to temporarily connect groups of neurons which are functionally related (Gray et al. 1989). Zero time-lag synchronization during γ oscillations was also found to extend across different cortical territories and was noted to be especially strong between areas that perform related functions (Roelfsema et al. 1997). Ultimately, these and other findings led to the transient coupling of distributed neuronal assemblies by γ oscillations being widely touted as a solution to the binding problem (see for example Engel and Singer 2001), i.e. how the brain creates a stable and coherent percept from a distinct but related array of sensory signals, and ensured that the study of fast brain oscillations has been maintained as an area of strong interest in
