Hidden Spirals Reveal Neurocomputational Mechanisms of Traveling Waves in Human Memory

Abstract

While traveling waves are often described as planar propagations across cortex, recent theoretical work predicts that more complex spatial patterns, including spiral dynamics, could organize large-scale neural computations but remain difficult to detect in the human brain. To investigate this, we analyzed direct brain recordings from humans performing a working memory task. To characterize traveling wave patterns, we used independent component analysis, and showed that traveling waves propagated along the cortex in complex spatial patterns that correlated with behaviors such as memory encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. We then developed a novel computational framework based on coupled phase oscillators to model these distinct wave patterns. This computational approach revealed hidden spirals that were not visible in the original recordings. The center of these hidden spirals shifted across the cortex to distinguish separate behavioral states, such as memory encoding and retrieval. Together, these findings reveal that cortical traveling waves are governed by latent spiral attractor dynamics and suggest that rotating wave architectures provide a fundamental neurocomputational mechanism for flexible human memory processing.