Do gamma oscillations play a role in cerebral cortex?

By Supratim Ray, John H. R. Maunsell. 2014

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gamma rhythm (which has a centre frequency between 30-80 Hz) is modulated by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and memory, and has been hypothesized to play a role in mediating these processes by supporting communication channels between cortical areas or encoding information in its phase. We here highlight several issues related to gamma rhythms, such as low and inconsistent power, its dependence on low-level stimulus features, problems due to conduction delays and contamination due to spike-related activity that makes accurate estimation of gamma phase difficult. Gamma rhythm could be a potentially useful signature of excitation-inhibition interactions in the brain, but whether it also provides a mechanism for information processing or coding remains an open question.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networks (2020, background): “For example, it has been debated whether synchrony is necessary (Merker, 2013; Riesenhuber and Poggio, 1999), fast enough (Ray and Maunsell, 2015; Palmigiano et al., 2017), and is capable of providing sufficient (temporal) resolution24 for separating multiple different objects.”
Cortical areas interact through a communication subspace (2019, background): “First, the communication subspace hypothesis does not require coordinated oscillations between the source and target areas, which can be difficult to achieve in practice (Ray and Maunsell, 2015).”
Rhythmicity Revisited: Evidence from Robust Behavioral Oscillations (2025, unknown): “…operations (i.e., feature binding) can be supported by alternative, non-rhythmic dynamics such as event-like, aperiodic transients in spiking activity or more sustained changes in firing rates, without relying on oscillatory synchronization 5–7 , or that feature binding is not even necessary 8 .”