Awake cortex stabilizes traveling waves for global and reliable information routing.
iScience August 21, 2026 Kaio Misawa, Koji Chinen, Akira Kawabata et al.
Traveling waves of neural activity serve as a fundamental mode for global information transfer across the cerebral cortex, and their properties differ between wakefulness and anesthesia. Using large-scale electrocorticography arrays in animals, visual-evoked traveling waves during wakefulness were more stable than under anesthesia. Only in the awake state did hierarchical clustering reveal widespread waves with a rich repertoire of motifs. Information flowed more reliably along the direction of wave propagation during wakefulness. These findings provide meso- and macroscopic evidence consistent with theories of consciousness and introduce a framework called informational tuning for characterizing the geometrical relations between neural and informational flows.