Neural Synchronization – Naive Questions

Neural synchronization occurs when many neurons fire together, with their timings aligned, often periodically with a given frequency.  Synchronization is clearly very pervasive in the brain (in EEG recordings of “brain waves” and different brain “rhythms”, for example).  However, I imagine we are still a ways away from having an authoritative explanation of the purpose of this synchronization.

In some cases the need for synchronizatoin seems clear – for example rhythmic movements (such as walking) seem like they would require rhythmic, synchronized neural firing.  But synchronization seems to be much more prevalent than that, and likely plays a critical role in many / most aspects of brain functioning.  As I’m writing this I haven’t read much on synchronization, and am about to read “Rhythms of the Brain” by Gyorgy Buzsaki, which looks to be a great introduction to neural synchronization, to try to get some sense of what we know about this.

One of the initial questions I have is (from an information perspective), if many neurons are firing in the same pattern, don’t we lose information?  In other words, isn’t much of the firing redundant?  I’m interested to find out how synchronization fits into an information processing framework.