The brain spends about half its energy maintaining electrochemical gradients that keep neurons ready to fire, enabling flexible responses to daily demands. Collective electrical activity appears as waves propagating across regions, like raised arms at a football game. New research shows these waves are more complex than previously thought.

Emerging evidence suggests traveling waves play a central role in brain function. "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, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a study published in April 2026 in Nature Communications, neuroscientists observed source waves, sink waves, and vortexlike spiral waves. The team, including Joshua Jacobs and Anup Das from the University of Chicago, found distinct wave patterns linked to different behavioral tasks.

Jacobs' lab uses intracranial recordings from epilepsy patients. With about 100 electrodes, they capture high-resolution data during thinking tasks. "Even if the traveling wave was just the result of neurons firing, it still tells us something very interesting about the brain based on what the person is doing," Jacobs said. A collaborator, Uma Mohan, now at the National Institutes of Health, was part of a team using this technique for memory tasks.

These wave patterns may help reorganize the brain in real time to meet behavioral demands, offering a new understanding of neural coordination.