We actively sample our visual environment via gaze shifts, primarily involving eye and head movements. While there has been extensive research on human eye movements, this is not the case for head movements, which remain severely underexplored, both in terms of their behavioral characteristics and underlying electrophysiology. Here, we report data from multiple experiments where human participants performed gaze shifts that included real-world head and eye movements. Head and eye tracking data were recorded simultaneously with scalp EEG in healthy participants and intracranial EEG in epilepsy patients. Our results show that gaze shifts are typically attained via a combination of an initial eye movement to the target location, followed by a head turn and a gaze-stabilizing eye movement. We find that the alpha rhythm (8-12 Hz) is lateralized over occipital areas in anticipation of head movements. Such alpha lateralization has been implied to indicate the allocation of attention prior to eye movements. Our results thus indicate that this functional relationship holds for gaze shifts involving both head and eye movements. In addition, the angle of gaze shifts involving head movements correlated with bilateral alpha desynchronization over posterior electrodes, after gaze shift is initiated. This might reflect computations in the parietal cortex required to keep track of the head angle with respect to the body reference frame. Our results provide important insights into real-world gaze shifts that are not restricted to eye movements and reveal electrophysiological dynamics in posterior brain areas that are spatially distinct and frequency specific.