Your brain may rely on sweeping waves of electrical activity to turn what your eyes see into a clear picture of the world.
Known as neural traveling waves, these electrical patterns move through brain tissue rather than remaining fixed in one location. By changing how responsive different groups of neurons are at a given moment, they may influence your attention, perception, and behavior.
In a review published in Neuron, Salk Institute neuroscientists argue that these waves are not merely background activity. Instead, they may function as a computational engine that helps the visual cortex create an internal model of the surrounding world. Similar processes could also operate in other parts of the brain.
This model could help explain why perception is not a perfect recording of reality. The brain constantly interprets sensory information, filling gaps, anticipating what comes next, and reconstructing events that have just occurred. Traveling waves may provide a mechanism for coordinating those operations across the cortex.
Waves That Shape What We Notice
Salk neuroscientist John Reynolds first identified traveling waves in the visual systems of awake animals in 2020. Scientists had previously observed wave activity under anesthesia, raising questions about whether it played a meaningful role in normal cognition. Reynolds’ laboratory showed that the waves also appear in alert animals and are linked to their ability to detect objects.
The timing of a wave could influence whether the visual cortex is especially receptive or less responsive when a stimulus appears. That may help explain the familiar experience of searching for an item, such as a pair of keys, while it remains visible in plain sight.
After establishing that the waves could affect perception from one moment to the next, Reynolds and his colleagues began asking a broader question: Why does the cortex generate them?
“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.
Four Jobs for Traveling Brain Waves
The researchers propose that traveling waves allow the visual cortex to perform four closely connected tasks. They may adjust perception in real time, preserve a temporary representation of recent sensory information, predict what is likely to happen next, and replay sequences associated with memories of events unfolding over time.
Under this framework, the waves do not simply carry electrical signals from one place to another. They emerge from recurrent circuits in which neurons repeatedly exchange information. The strength of the connections within those circuits, described as their physiology (“synaptic weights”), can change through experience.
Every sight, sound, smell, and action leaves some imprint on these connections. Over time, those changes may allow the brain to learn recurring features of its environment and build a working model of how the world normally behaves.
“This is, in a meaningful sense, analogous to what large language models like ChatGPT do,” explains Reynolds. “They learn statistical structure from language and use that knowledge to generate meaningful and appropriately structured text that reflects the patterns of language. The brain may be doing something functionally similar—a biological generative model built from the ground up by experience.”
Turning Experience Into Perception
Both systems may learn patterns from past information and use those patterns to interpret new input. In the brain, this ability is essential because sensory signals are often noisy, incomplete, or ambiguous.
The visual system, for example, receives changing two-dimensional images from the eyes even though the world contains stable objects arranged in 3D space. Those images shift whenever the eyes, head, or body move. Yet perception usually remains continuous because the brain accounts for those movements and relies on learned expectations about objects, motion, physics, and the body.
The new framework proposes that networks of synapses absorb these regularities through experience. Traveling waves generated by those networks could then help the brain determine the most likely cause of incoming sensory signals rather than processing each fragment in isolation.
Reference: “Neural traveling waves in cortex: Network mechanisms and potential roles in neural computation” by Lyle Muller, Alexandra N. Busch, Zachary W. Davis and John H. Reynolds, 21 July 2026, Neuron.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2026.06.019
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (R01 EY028723, U01 NS131914, and U01 NS139877, EY014800), Research to Prevent Blindness, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Western University, Compute Ontario, and Digital Research Alliance of Canada.
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