This page is about phase-sensitive (pulsed, spiked) neural networks and spectral (frequency-based, oscillatory) methods in neural computations and memory. Many people come to the conclusion that exact timing of spikes is more important than firing rates of neurons (see, e.g., my Neural Cells as Harmony Detectors essay). A lot of them also believe that the good stability-plasticity properties of biological neural nets (their ability to learn new information without forgetting the old) is due to a holographic-like effect.
Here I mainly list some books and Web-based resources on the subject. Here I only underline one key idea, which started to emerge in recent years. While there are a lot of synchronization mechanisms in neural networks, which cause the emergence of self-organized periodic synchronous firing of large groups of cells (see, e.g., work on Neural Dynamics Research done in Boston University), the way to perform the computations and storage efficiently (at least in the artificial models) is to hit those models with external carrier wave (a particular frequency, be it 5 Hz or 40 Hz, does not seem to matter that much), so that computational processes correspond to modulations of this wave.
There is a growing belief that it is some kind of cooperative activity of large group of neural cell that is the equivalent of consciousness. What "cooperative" means here remains the key topic of exploration. Synchronous periodic firing by groups of neurons is one extremely bright example of such a cooperation, but there is no good general theory of various forms of possible cooperation.
F.Rieke et al. Spikes : exploring the neural code. MIT Press, 1997.
W.Maass et al (eds). Pulsed Neural Networks. MIT Press, 1999, 2001.
H.Wilson. Spikes, decisions, and actions : the dynamical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
Frank Hoppensteadt's Home Page.