Blue Brain Shows Gamma Oscillations

Recently at the inagural INCF conference on Neuroinformatics the researcher Henry Markam has reported that the Blue Brain simulation of the rat cortical column has produced oscillatory activity in the gamma frequency band (40-80hz). You can watch a video here that has more about the project. The blog Neuronism discusses this recent development (Blue Brain shows gamma oscillations).

Cortical oscillations and synchrony have long been touted as candidate mechanisms to solve the ‘binding problem’ in theoretical neuroscience: when we examine the world around us, how do our brains group multiple parts of the same object together into a coherent whole?

This basically means the computer simulation is replicating higher brain processes. I think researchers have shown oscillatory activity in other brain computer models in the past. This indicates that researchers are actually getting a decent representation of the underlying neurons and how they interact. This behavior was not programmed either and merely emerged as a function of simulating the 10,000 cortical neurons.