Electrical activity can move across the brain's surface in patterns known as traveling brain waves or neural traveling waves. Like waves in the ocean, these patterns can arise from different sources, including activity generated within the brain and signals coming from the environment. Research suggests they can also influence attention and behavior from one moment to the next.
Now, Salk Institute neuroscientists have brought together physiological and computational research on these waves and proposed a broader explanation for what they do. Their conclusion is that neural traveling waves may function as a computational engine in the visual cortex. By moving through neural circuits, the waves may help the visual cortex (and likely other areas of the brain) create internal representations of the outside world, supporting our ability to perceive what is happening, reconstruct recent information, and anticipate what may happen next.
The review was published in Neuron on July 21, 2026. Salk neuroscientist John Reynolds, PhD, was the first to identify traveling brain waves in the visual systems of awake animals back in 2020. His laboratory also discovered that the waves were directly associated with whether an animal successfully noticed an object placed in front of it.
That finding may help explain a familiar experience: looking repeatedly for something, such as a pair of keys, only to realize it was visible the entire time. The object was present, but the brain did not successfully register it at that particular moment. Once Reynolds and his colleagues had established that traveling waves occur in awake animals and can influence whether a visual stimulus is perceived, a larger question emerged: Why does the brain generate these waves in the first place?
"This paper lays out, for the first time in a single integrated framework, what the brain can actually compute by virtue of having this recurrent wave-generating circuitry," says Reynolds, senior and co-corresponding author of the paper. A Possible Engine for Perception and Prediction The researchers concentrated on the visual cortex and proposed four major functions for neural traveling waves. The waves may adjust perception from moment to moment, transform recent sensory information into an internal representation, produce short-term predictions about the surrounding world, and preserve and replay patterns associated with memories of events that unfold over time.
Together, these abilities suggest that traveling waves may be central to how the brain interprets incoming information rather than simply reflecting background electrical activity. Brain Waves May Be More Than Electrical Noise Under the new framework, neural brain waves are not merely electrical noise passing through the nervous system. The connections responsible for generating the waves do more than transmit signals.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
