Starting from the idea that neural group activity as such, is unlikely to be immediately relevant for neural synchronization, we investigate mechanisms that act on the level of individual nerve impulses (spikes). Hence, we consider populations of formal spike emitting 'leaky integrate & fire'-neurons instead of networks built from non-spiking oscillators. After outlining the principle of synchronization for basic forms of recurrent impulse coupling by using a pair of simplified formal neurons, we show that local lateral inhibition serves for robust impulse synchronization in networks with non-vanishing transmission delays.