In a new study, a team of researchers at the Gdansk University of Technology in Poland looked at how fast brainwaves occur across different brain areas during stages of memory processing.
The researchers recorded brain activity from patients with epilepsy while the patients tried to remember and recall lists of words. The team found that short bursts of fast brain activity often happened simultaneously in different areas of the brain. These bursts were especially strong just before the patients recalled words.
Approximately half of the brain areas the researchers recorded showed this synchronised activity, which tended to happen in sequences of bursts rather than all at once. The findings suggest that these synchronised brainwaves help the brain to organise information for memory, as well as other functions.
The Human brain local field potential recordings during a battery of multilingual cognitive and eye-tracking tasks (v1) data used in this study are available on the EBRAINS Knowledge Graph: https://doi.org/10.25493/4FZH-ZCG.
Full paper
Prathapagiri, S., Cimbalnik, J., García-Salinas, J.S. et al. Global coincident bursts of high frequency oscillations across the human cortex coordinate large-scale memory processing. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70633-7
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