In my recent blog post I discussed cortical activity waves that are the physical carriers of memory and thought. I have also discussed traveling waves in earlier blogs, and today I wish to post excerpts from a very recent article entitled “Traveling Waves in the Prefrontal Cortex during Working Memory.” Authors are Sayak Bhattacharya, Scott L. Brincat et al. It is published in PLOS Computational Biology, January 28, 2022.
From this article we see that traveling waves are becoming more understood as “spatially organized patterns whose peaks and troughs move sequentially across cortex. . . . waves were modulated during performance of a working memory task [and we know that cognitive tasks are actualized through neural codes learned over a lifetime and archived in memory]. During baseline conditions, waves flowed bidirectionally along a specific axis of orientation. Waves in different frequency bands could travel in different directions. During task performance, there was an increase in waves in one direction over the other, especially in the beta band. . . . Traveling waves can serve specific functions. . . . Traveling waves are of interest because they have a variety of useful properties for cognition, development and behavior. They can create timing relationships that foster spike-timing dependent plasticity and memory encoding. . . . Their functional relevance in the adult brain is suggested by observations that traveling wave characteristics can be task-dependent and that they impact behavior [I would add that these waves reflect cognitive behavior] . . . Oscillatory activity in the prefrontal cortex has been linked with cognitive functions like working memory and attention. . . . The waves did not travel in random directions. . . . Traveling waves have multiple characteristics - such as direction, phase organization, speed - all of which can serve specific functions, making these waves a potentially powerful computational tool.”
And I would add that traveling waves are a powerful functional “tool” of the intent of a cognitive mind. We are seeing in excerpts from this article that the cognitive mind generates traveling waves that are transmitted in specified directions to achieve intended objectives. I propose that the Holy Spirit can generate such waves to communicate specific objectives as well! We are perhaps seeing the process of communion between the Mind of God and the mind of Man enabled via the synaptic networks of the human brain. Yes, the Holy Spirit desires a personal bidirectional communion with us in our time as He has in the past and will going into the eternal future.