Surprisingly Complex brain Waves while processing memory

Amazing stuff!

"... emerging evidence in humans and animals suggests that traveling waves play a central role in how the brain functions. ...

In a study ... neuroscientists measured traveling waves of neural activity and observed a menagerie:
source waves that appear to emanate from one location,
sink waves that converge on a spot, and
vortex like spiral waves.

The team ... found that different behavioral tasks were associated with distinct wave patterns. ...

With the high-resolution method, ... observed two new classes of waves in awake humans for the first time.

One, emanating from an area of the cortex, was a concentric wave, like the ripples from a pebble dropped into a lake, or the reverse, in which waves converged on one region.

The other was a rotating spiral wave traveling in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction, like a hurricane or a flushing toilet. ..."

"A new study ... used direct recordings of brain activity from human participants to show how “traveling waves” of activity spread across different regions of the brain to coordinate memory formation and recall. The activity forms distinct patterns, such as spirals and concentric waves, that change depending on what the person was doing, including remembering individual items. ..."

From the abstract:

"A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is explaining how widespread brain regions flexibly interact to support behaviors.

We hypothesize that traveling waves of oscillations are a key mechanism of neural coordination, such that they propagate across the cortex in distinctive spatial patterns that control how different regions interact.

To test this hypothesis, we used direct brain recordings from humans performing multiple memory experiments and an analytical framework that flexibly measures the propagation patterns of traveling waves.

We found that traveling waves propagated along the cortex in not only plane waves, but also spirals, sources and sinks, and more complex patterns.

The propagation patterns of traveling waves correlated with novel aspects of behavior, with specific spatial patterns reflecting particular cortical processes and even individual remembered items.

Our findings show that large-scale cortical patterns of traveling waves reveal a diverse range of spatial patterns in the brain that are relevant for neural decoding."

Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain’s Inner Workings | Quanta Magazine "Unexpected patterns traveling across the cortex may be reorganizing its activity in real time."

Spirals, sources, sinks, and planes: What brain waves can tell us about memory (original news release) "New research from UChicago and the University of Pittsburgh shows how the brain creates distinct patterns of activity as it processes memories."

Planar, spiral, and concentric traveling waves distinguish behavioral states in human memory (open access)

Fig. 1: Task structure and identification of stable periods of traveling waves.

Fig. 3: Classification of traveling waves.