Functional Brain Oscillations: How Oscillations Facilitate Information Representation and Code Memories

The overall aim of the modelling works within this thesis is to lend theoretical evidence to empirical findings from the brain oscillations literature. We therefore hope to solidify and expand the notion that precise spike timing through oscillatory mechanisms facilitates communication, learning, information processing and information representation within the brain. The primary hypothesis of this thesis is that it can be shown computationally that neural de-synchronisations can allow information content to emerge. We do this using two neural network models, the first of which shows how differential rates of neuronal firing can indicate when a single item is being actively represented. The second model expands this notion by creating a complimentary timing mechanism, thus enabling the emergence of qualitive temporal information when a pattern of items is being actively represented. The secondary hypothesis of this thesis is that it can be also be shown computationally that oscillations might play a functional role in learning. Both of the models presented within this thesis propose a sparsely coded and fast learning hippocampal region that engages in the binding of novel episodic information. The first model demonstrates how active cortical representations enable learning to occur in their hippocampal counterparts via a phase-dependent learning rule. The second model expands this notion, creating hierarchical temporal sequences to encode the relative temporal position of cortical representations. We demonstrate in both of these models, how cortical brain oscillations might provide a gating function to the representation of information, whilst complimentary hippocampal oscillations might provide distinct phasic reference points for learning.