{"id":243078,"date":"2026-08-23T01:02:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T06:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/new-brain-wave-theory-explains-cognition-and-consciousness"},"modified":"2026-08-23T01:02:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T06:02:20","slug":"new-brain-wave-theory-explains-cognition-and-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/new-brain-wave-theory-explains-cognition-and-consciousness","title":{"rendered":"New brain wave theory explains cognition and consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-brain-wave-theory-explains-cognition-and-consciousness.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new theory, published in <em>The Journal of Neuroscience<\/em> by three scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, offers an explanation of how the brain produces cognition and consciousness: It uses traveling waves of rhythmic neural activity to coordinate nimble neural networks with analog computations.<\/p>\n<p>The metaphor that the brain operates with \u201ccircuits\u201d is incomplete, said Picower Professor Earl K. Miller, the paper\u2019s senior author. Indubitably, the brain\u2019s physically connected circuits provide the infrastructure to store our memories and represent our ongoing needs and goals. But when we need to make improvised use of that knowledge in the rapid-fire, anything goes sensory context the world constantly throws our way, we can\u2019t just depend on the relatively slow chemical process of rewiring those circuit connections called \u201csynapses,\u201d he said. Instead, the brain needs a control system that can coordinate millions of neurons to process information in a fraction of a second. Brain waves, long understood to be the synchronized rhythmic fluctuations of large groups of neurons, turn out to be performing that crucial service, Miller and his colleagues argue, citing years of experimental evidence from his lab and many others.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Circuits and synapses are important and fundamental, that\u2019s the start. But there is more going on. The brain generates waves, and wave dynamics are a highly efficient way to coordinate and perform computation<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new theory, published in The Journal of Neuroscience by three scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, offers an explanation of how the brain produces cognition and consciousness: It uses traveling waves of rhythmic neural activity to coordinate nimble neural networks with analog computations. The metaphor that the brain operates [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":692,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,47,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-neuroscience","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/692"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}