Reddit reviews Rhythms of the Brain

I'm not exceptionally well-versed on the current theories of time-keeping in the brain, but know enough to say that there are multiple neural mechanisms that span timescales.
Your specific example is sensitivity to coincident input from two delay lines of different length. This works for millisecond resolution timing discrimination, as is necessary for binaural object localization in auditory cortex brainstem. However, it probably is not the mechanism when we look at timescales longer than a few tens of milliseconds, the timescale of synaptic integration in a dendrite.

Here are some example mechanisms for other timescales.

• Brain-wide regular oscillations of neural activity (i.e. theta band of 8Hz, Gamma band of 40Hz) can serve as your 'clock' for subsecond time measurement see Rhythms of the Brain .
  
  
• Linear ramps in neural activity in motor planning areas can code for time over seconds timescales, see work by Fetz.
  
  
• Neurons can specifically fire at extremely precise times within a motor sequence, see the work in songbirds of Michael Fee.
  
  
• Cognitive knowledge of our percent progress towards the completion of a task with estimated total duration could code for minutes to hour scales.
  
  
• Day-long oscillations in gene-expression and neural activity in the superchiasmatic nucleus (circadian rhythm center) works for timescales of more than a few hours.
  
  The brain likely integrates all these mechanisms and others to form the gestalt of 'what time is it?' and 'how long have I been doing this?'
  

If you're actually looking to get your hands dirty in connectionist techniques, and you don't mind a pretty academic tone, then CECN is fantastic. it has exercises in free and extremely powerful neural network software, but is interesting independent of that.

On the other hand, if you want something a little more along the lines of popular science writing like on intelligence, "Rhythms of the Brain" is fantastic (though pretty neuroscience heavy). i can't recommend a more purely ai book for you, though; CECN is all the AI i need ;)

That's ridiculous - synchrony arises out of some very simple neuron-level processes. Neurons are basically built to synchronize based on the interaction of excitation and inhibition with their natural time constants. This was (first?) demonstrated for interneurons by Wang and Buzsaki in (1) and my very own adviser describes mechanisms for excitatory/inhibitory synchronous activity in a recent paper (2). Now these papers describe local and cross columnar synchronization (except the Tiesinga paper does utilize long range excitation to synchronize a local network), but the the mechanism is essentially the same.

You have different parts of the brain, all oscillating all the time as a natural result of their dynamics. Long distance connections cause these oscillations to change phase/frequency content, sometimes locking two areas and sometimes unlocking them. Buszaki has written an entire book about this, if you are interested (3). It would be approachable by an enthusiastic layman. He basically asserts oscillations are the essential building blocks of non trivial neuronal computations. No quantum mechanics involved.

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    (1)
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8815919?dopt=Abstract
    (2) http://neuro.physics.unc.edu/pdfs/CalinJCNS06.pdf
    (3)
    http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy-Buzsaki/dp/0195301064/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210429334&sr=8-1

Here is a fun book for you to read.

http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy-Buzsaki/dp/0195301064

When I started I was recommended Psychophysiological Recording but that's more general and covers ECG, respiration etc.

Possibly Rhythms of the Brain for background on frequency measures.

I'm not sure what would be good as a general EEG background. If I think of anything I'll let you know.