Thomas Kuhn got it right.

I assume that if the brain is doing it, it is probably important. A safe assumption at our current level of understanding. And, yes, it seems like every time I say, "there is more going on than spikes", people accuse me of saying "spikes don't matter". No one is saying that.

Traveling waves are constantly sweeping across your cortex. And they are highly organized. They must be doing something. When you see organization in the brain, function follows. Here are two examples:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Read more about Charlie Gross here:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
"We guarantee that you’ve never met anyone quite like Charlie Gross"

Another of Charlie Gross’s passions was history of neuroscience. He wrote excellent books. This gave him a wide-angle view. He taught us that dogma exists to be challenged, we haven’t figured things out, and being a stepping stone is inevitable and perfectly fine.
direct.mit.edu/books/book/2...

And BTW, you are right. It is good to work in a growing field with some elbow room. I also learned that from Charlie Gross, who was recording in IT cortex when Hubel and Weisel were recording in V1.

Also Walter J. Freeman. He considered oscillations to be signatures of large, self-organizing cortical fields that carry meaning at the mesoscopic scale. And that is exactly what has been found. The beta-gamma wave packet he found in the olfactory bulb has been confirmed by Leslie Kay among others

Thanks for the lively discussion. It is good to air all these issues and draw attention to the work.

And again, analog computation per se is new but not the role of oscillations. There has been decades of experiments, models, etc, including Donald Hebb's Organization of Behavior (1949).
oscillatory and reverberatory activity were reflected in cell assemblies and reverberating circuits.

Again, let's not hold oscillations to a higher standard than spiking. "These papers show association, not causation. Necessary but not sufficient" is also true for spikes! You can't prove causation, especially in the brain, as we point out in this paper.
www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Don't get me wrong. There is still alot to learn from spiking. I just have a healthy disrespect for dogma (that I learned from Charlie Gross) and always prefer looking to where things are going instead of where they've been.

And I think a direct correspondence between movements in a mathematical representation of spiking activity and a traveling wave moving across cortex is a pretty good clue that waves have something to do with computation.
doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

Coincidentally, I met colleagues who built RNN networks with oscillations. The oscillations prevent the RNNs from the catastrophic collapse they are prone to. They increase storage capacity and allow faster learning. Stay tuned for that paper.

And now you are moving thr goalposts. The analog computation part is a brand new theory, I debuted it 1 week ago!

What all those papers show is oscillations regulating spiking, which you seemed to question, but is clearly true from the all the empirical evidence.

Causality is difficult to prove, especially in the brain
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Causal manipulations are just a good tool for doing correlational studies.