Lyle Muller, Alexandra N. Busch, Zachary W. Davis and John H. Reynolds (2026), Neuron 114(17):3156–3174 — DOI-10.1016/j.neuron.2026.06.019
Key takeaways
Registered from the abstract and keywords, not a reading. What follows is what the abstract says.
- Neural traveling waves, first found in anaesthetised animals, are now seen throughout the brains of awake animals, where they “influence neural excitability and behavior”. They can arise in ongoing activity or be triggered by sensory input and behavioural events.
- By structuring activity within a cortical region, they introduce “spatiotemporal dependencies across sensory maps that are not naturally captured by purely feedforward or feedback processing”.
- The review defines the waves, outlines circuit mechanisms that generate them (its keywords name horizontal and patchy connections), and argues that waves can implement computations such as predicting upcoming input by embedding sensory history in a region’s evolving activity. It closes with a conceptual framework for “spatiotemporal, generative processing” by waves travelling over sensory maps.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, in a batch of four works on large-scale neural dynamics with Verzhbinsky et al. (LIT-633), Xu et al. (LIT-638) and Vishne et al. (LIT-644). No anthology topic holds cortical wave physiology. The review’s computational framing (generative processing, prediction) might interest the anthology if it proposes wave-based architectures for machine learning, but the abstract says nothing of that, and the flag is not set on an unread work.
Deferred because it was not read: no lawful copy was reachable (see
the status note).
Where it would bear, once read:
- Xu et al. (LIT-638, NOTE-502) find rotating waves across the whole cortex in fMRI and cite Davis, Muller et al. (2020) on spontaneous travelling waves gating perception in behaving primates. This review covers waves within single areas, measured electrophysiologically. A reading should say whether it treats rotating waves and phase singularities, and whether it takes the fMRI spirals as the same phenomenon.
- Verzhbinsky et al. (LIT-633) put long-range coordination in zero-lag synchronous ripples. A reading should note what the review says about synchrony against propagation.
- Pattern formation. Cross and Hohenberg (LIT-527) class travelling waves as type I_o instabilities, and Turing (LIT-535) has them as his case (e). The keyword “horizontal connections” suggests the review’s mechanism is the conduction delay along cortical axons, not a reaction–diffusion instability; a reading should check.
Priority for a reading: moderate. It is the batch’s only review, and the only work here on the computational role of waves.
Access when seeded:
- PubMed record 42480536 (abstract, keywords, dates, affiliations).
- Crossref record (Elsevier licences: TDM from 1 September 2026; the accepted-manuscript open-access licence starts 2 September 2027).
- Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar: closed, no repository location. Europe PMC: no PMC copy, no preprint. arXiv: the Muller group’s preprints on travelling waves (2309.08045, 2502.06034) are different works.
- cell.com: a bot-challenge page; not pursued.