I would be interested in Jeff’s thoughts on the functional relevance of neural activity at the fine temporal scale. The timesteps of HTM can be envisioned as demarcated by an underlying inhibitory oscillation, but the global lock enforced by discrete timesteps is a strong assumption. For one, it precludes the ability of different cortical regions to dynamically couple in and out of phase as necessary (the communication-through-coherence hypothesis), and it also constrains the ability of the network to adapt to varying extrinsic rhythms in the body and the world. There’s also mounting evidence that conduction delays might serve an important computational purpose.
In other words, what role do you see for fine-grained spiking and oscillatory dynamics in a mature theory of the brain?