Daniel M. Ingram:
Alright, pure speculation, just so everyone know this is totally made up on the fly and not science at all:
There are various awareness centers in the brain, and when we wire the most conscious of them to brain area after brain area as they tour through during the stages of insight, which, during their progress bring up issue after issue corresponding to brain center after brain center, pathway after pathway, process after process, eventually we have wired them all sufficiently to this awareness center, and this has some sort of synchronizing effect, such that when the attentional centers all synchronize for one great burst of 3-4 pulses of total mental synchrony, as occurs in Conformity knowledge and the few pulses afterwards, this causes the brain centers all to converge totally and without remainder on the end of that last pulse and take themselves all the way down to whatever happens between the frames, typically referred to as Nibbana in the Abhidhamma, and these synchronized centers converge on that, and in that convergence somehow something shifts, a switch is thrown, and a new set of pathways come on line, such that the benefits of stream entry are switched on.
Daniel
From "The Ego Tunnel" -CHAPTER TWO APPENDIX THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A CONVERSATION WITH WOLF SINGER
"Singer: A unique property of consciousness is its coherence. The contents of consciousness change continuously, at the pace of the experienced present, but at any one moment all the contents of phenomenal awareness are related to one another, unless there is a pathological condition causing a disintegration of conscious experience. This suggests a close relation between consciousness and binding. It seems that only those results of the numerous computational processes that have been bound successfully will enter consciousness simultaneously. This notion also establishes a close link among consciousness, short-term memory, and attention. Evidence indicates that stimuli need to be attended to in order to be perceived consciously, and only then will they have access to short-term memory.
The binding problem results from two distinct features of the brain: First, the brain is a highly distributed system, in which a very large number of operations are carried out in parallel; second, it lacks a single convergence center, in which the results of these parallel computations could be evaluated in a coherent way. The various processing modules are interconnected, in an exceedingly dense and complex network of reciprocal connections, and these appear to be generating globally ordered states, by means of powerful self-organizing mechanisms. It follows that representations of complex cognitive contents—perceptual objects, thoughts, action plans, reactivated memories—must have a distributed structure as well. This requires that neurons participating in a distributed representation of a particular type of content convey two messages in parallel: First, they have to signal whether the feature they’re tuned to is present; second, they have to indicate which of the many other neurons they’re cooperating with in forming a distributed representation. It is widely accepted that neurons signal the presence of the feature they encode by increasing their discharge frequency; however, there’s less consensus about how neurons signal with which other neurons they cooperate.
achieved if neurons engage in rhythmic, oscillatory discharges, because oscillatory processes can be synchronized more easily than temporally unstructured activation sequences.
Metzinger: Then this isn’t just a hypothesis—there’s supportive experimental evidence.
Singer: Since the discovery of synchronized oscillatory discharges in the visual cortex more than a decade ago, more and more evidence has supported the hypothesis that synchronization of oscillatory activity may be the mechanism for the binding of distributed brain processes—whereas the relevant oscillation frequencies differ for different structures and in the cerebral cortex typically cover the range of beta- and gamma-oscillations: 20 to 80 Hz. What makes the synchronization phenomena particularly interesting in the present context is that they occur in association with a number of functions relevant for conscious experience."
Buy the book already...you know you want to

~D