Paul Koch and Gerry Leisman have published an article entitled “Cortical Activity Waves Are the Physical Carriers of Memory and Thought.” Readers of my more recent blogs have noted how coherent waveforms are transmitted through synaptic networks that are encoded with specified information within spike trains of action potentials. The authors offer that “coherent waves are instrumental in the retrieval of memory and random waves embody original thought.”
I am encouraged that these authors are linking cortical waves with thought which I have associated with the activity of an immaterial cognitive mind. They continue, “. . . there are numerous different possible neural firing patterns . . . . If each active subset of individual cortical cells represents a distinct thought, there are about 10^6 billion . . . possibilities for about 20 billion cortical cells. . . . [The authors do not] “describe how these patterns are decoded into a mixture of the semantic content of different wave-memories and memories of previous thoughts. . . . All mammals are subject to cortical activity waves, but only humans can associate language (words, music, fine art, dance, algebra, etc.) with the waves, and thus can have memories of our thoughts.”
In my blogs and books I have provided evidence that wave “patterns” are the neural codes within spike trains of action potentials, and I submit that memory is instantiated within neural codes having meaning, or semantics, and purpose. Are waves generated by “original thought” truly random, or are they the product of cognitive intent? Humans have been uniquely created by God to transmit linguistic neural codes that are actively interpreted by the immaterial mind and are archived in memory. I suggest that this point applies to “words, music, fine art, dance, algebra, etc.” The authors make no direct mention of the cognitive mind, but dualist interaction between an immaterial mind and the neural synaptic network processes can give a more complete analysis of the excellent observations made by these authors in my view.