Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain's inner workings

For context, the debate in the field has been whether these are epiphenomena of the actual neuronal activity, or a meaningful driver of further activity.

I don’t think these studies quite rest the case. As Buzsaki comments in the article, the action is in the cells to create these waves. Do the waves themselves get measured and impact what happens next? The issue at hand is: synaptic currents are stronger and we know neurons respond to them. The wave behavior is in the extracellular fluid as well, and that part we have evidence neurons don’t respond much to.

That said, thing the article doesn’t talk about is astrocytes. Especially in the cortex, most synapses are tripartite. There’s an astrocytic end foot that sheathes the synapse and regulates how much of the bulk extracellular space has access to the synapse. And one astrocyte can touch thousands of synapses and in humans, hundreds of thousands. They also form a syncitium, through gap junctions/electrical synapses.

Do astrocytes respond to the extracellular wave behavior, which potentially changes the extent and behavior of the syncitium, and thus impact the neurons they touch?

That’s still an open question but that’s what I’d be interested to find out more about.

> If you’re paying attention to what you are looking at, signals are traveling backward from receptors in your eyes to the visual cortex, and then forward into the rest of the brain via the wave to form a memory.

has someone used muse2 to measure there brain waves are indeed some how different on days/hours when tehy are focused?

Let me explain. I have ADHD, I am on medication. I read an alternate hypothesis to stimulant based treatment of how attention networks don't necessarily change with intake of traditional stimulants[1]; this is also something i have experienced.

Personally, medication helps me keep certain negative thoughts and resistance to doing things, but it does not help with longer arc change in executive functioning like planning or strategy. It just removes some barriers to focus on _a_ task, whatever is in front of me and I can do it. The only thing that really worked for executive function improvemement is meditation for 45 mins a day. I believe that also puts the brain waves in a different state. Which is why I've been interested in brain activity tracking and why this article is interesting too.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/science/adhd-attention-mo...

OT - This is pretty interesting research in understanding the flow of information through the brain. The correlation with similar research using mice appears to confirm these flow modes.

My thoughts on reading this article were not about how the information or electricity flows while the brain is engaged but more about whether this may help understand the origin of and the sensations associated with migraine or cluster migraine type headaches. I have relatives who suffer from migraines and they are debilitating, very painful experiences. As a geophysicist I understand waves, frequencies, sample rates, array design, and lots of other things.

The research here took advantage of more dense arrays implanted in the brains of epileptics and allowed reconstruction of wavefields detected much as one would use a stationary seismic array in earthquake detection and signal propagation studies.

I am left wondering whether a migraine trigger could occur when brain wave amplitudes interfere constructively at specific synapses (?) causing the signal amplitudes which are normally well-handled to swamp the region where the migraine is triggered. In many cases, light is a trigger and sufferers need to get to a dark place and cover up while the headache reverberates. I guess I would love to understand how to help dampen the severity of the headaches so that they can return to normal function as quickly as possible.

In summary - are migraine headaches related to wavefield interference such that impinging waves from the sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc) form a high amplitude standing wave focused on the region where these waves would normally arrive out of phase with little or no interference and the standing wave generates a physical sensation of deep pain in the skull sometimes with visual auras preceding the migraine event.

Y'all are some pretty smart guys. Ignore this OT post. I was just thinking.

Bit of a sensationalist title - EEG/iEEG measurements have led to worthwhile clinical outcomes but also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.

More accurate, much less sexy title: Intracranial Recordings Uncover Spiral and Concentric Brain Waves During Memory Tasks" (study completed only on small cohorts of epilepsy patients performing constrained memory tasks).

No inner workings revealed or laid bare, just another piece of evidence contributing to a small part of the debate in cortical electrophysiological studies on whether or not some data measures can be discarded as the downstream, messy noise of the neurons firing or actual, high-fidelity signals of activity

My hypothesis:

Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.

I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.

One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”

Has anyone worked with https://shop.openbci.com/products/ultracortex-mark-iv?varian...? If so could they share how easy/ergonomic it was to have this set up to move around the home and work with and record data?

> Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings

From my ignorant point of view I can't quite make sense of the title. Brain is probably the last organ one would be surprised to find complexity in. I can see "surprisingly complex wave reveal spleen inner workings" being a good title, like "wow, we though it was a dumb blood filter, but look what we found!" kind of a thing. But for the brain isn't the default assumption that has it complexity we haven't figure out yet?

the problem is: do these waves affect a neuron's behavior?

eeg waveology faces the same problem as, for instance, Penrose and the quantum brain gang. there can be epiphenomena - they're not causal, but inconsequential side-effect.

the main point is that a wave doesn't carry much signal. at most it can synchronize, but it's across an apparently uselessly large population.

Brain waves are to biological neural populations what large-scale, low-dimensional activation modes in the transformer’s residual stream are to an LLM.

Wow!!

“The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’” said Earl K. Miller(opens a new tab), a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It’d be interesting to try and model the various waveforms observed as time crystals and see if the mathematics of the latter can (partially) predict the former.

I think there will be a lot to be learned if we can scale up the high resolution measurement methods here to map exactly how brainwaves travel when performing specific tasks.

Maybe they should recruit experienced meditators who can give accurate introspective self-reports to be compared to the measurements, then we would start to have a relatively confident map between brain physiology and psychology. (e.g. X brain pattern in Y region specifically corresponds to the Z step of reasoning when solving the problem)

I know it's anecdotal and irrelevant to the real science, but whenever neuroscience comes up, I think about the Exhalation short story Ted Chian, about a civilization with brains that rely on air pressure, and a deep explanation of these alien brains and at the same time made me appreciate that we also still know so little about our own, they may as well be the same.

This is what Walter J. Freeman III* spent his career working on, surprised he wasn't mentioned. I used to be very obsessed with him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_III

Nonlinear brain dynamics as macroscopic manifestation of underlying many-body field dynamics, https://arxiv.org/html/q-bio/0511037

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609235302/http://sulcus.ber...

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[*] No, not that guy; the son of that guy.

Edit: I've never seen a wikipedia page with so many typos.

Stopped reading here when I recognized the slop “The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’”

Is there any evidence the brain is a quantum device?

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Now do Beavis and Butthead.

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I wonder what the "waves" in LLMs are; The global firing patterns that can help us interpret what the weights are doing en-masse