Assessing the Brain Wave Hypothesis: Call for Commentary

Abstract

It has been proposed that there is a wave excitation in animal brains, whose role is to represent three dimensional local space in a working memory. Evidence for the wave comes from the mammalian thalamus, the central body of the insect brain, and from computational models of spatial cognition. This is described in related papers. I assess the Bayesian probability that the wave exists, from this evidence. The probability of the wave in the brain is robustly greater than 0.4. If there is such a wave, we may need to re-think our whole understanding of the brain, in a break from classical neuroscience. I ask other researchers to comment on the wave hypothesis and on this assessment. In a companion paper, I outline possible ways to test it.