Not pretending having myself understood what they are for, those questions about waves are for me quite reminiscent of the following video (and from that point onward I hereby vow never to thank @bitking for a link again) :
But I believe you watched it already, Gary 
Could you please develop on that intuition, even if not totally clear yet ?
This wave phenomenon… I have no clue what to make of it. But for what it’s worth, its existence is well kept somewhere in my mind. As I acknowledge in the model-oriented companion post, there is in my view a very real possibility that taking it into account is necessary for self-organizing as V1 does.
For my part, I’d like to know exactly that. What are the requirements for it, using our biological knowledge and our best guesses at a computational model.
Shall those waves (and swirls !) be a primary ingredient, this would be a pity for most of our current, early AGI attempts, as this would make it hard to compute efficiently, but that would lay out some pretty relevant basis at least.
IIRC your nice model of the rat avoiding cyclic shock areas does use wave propagation in some way ? To be honest I’d be glad to bring together any goodwill for it. I believe today that throwing all we have at V1 is one of our best bets. At least for starting to understand anything of the neocortical sheet.