Brain oscillations and memory

Oscillatory fluctuations of local field potentials (LFPs) in the theta (4-8 Hz) and gamma (25-140 Hz) band are held to play a mechanistic role in various aspects of memory including the representation and off-line maintenance of events and sequences of events, the assessment of novelty, the induction of plasticity during encoding, as well as the consolidation and the retrieval of stored memories. Recent findings indicate that theta and gamma related mechanisms identified in rodent studies have significant parallels in the neurophysiology of human and non-human primate memory. This correspondence between species opens new perspectives for a mechanistic investigation of human memory function.