Do the biological details matter?

Phillips & Singer (P&S) extend ideas derived from the observation eight years ago that the coherence (synchronization) of cortical oscillations can be modulated by the structure of visual stimuli. As described in the target article, a large part of the continued interest in this finding is related to independent theoretical work suggesting that synchronized cell firing could help solve the problem of binding together within cortex neuronal activity associated with different attributes of visual stimuli. The authors present an abstract "proof of concept" model describing how their cortical processing scheme could work, but our biologically realistic models of cortical relationships suggest that the proposal is biologically implausible. Our realistic models lead to a very different interpretation of the significance of cortical oscillations.