Your brain is constantly lying to you

Instead of processing the entire, overwhelming amount of information that floods us, our brain takes shortcuts by ignoring most of it and anticipating what’s to come. What we actually experience is the brain’s prediction of the immediate future and the reality around us.

The body absorbs countless stimuli every second via its senses. The eyes process shapes, colour and depth, integrating them into a continuous movie; ears process frequencies, their pitch and strength, gauging their orientation and distance; the skin processes temperature, moisture, electric charge, texture, and so much more! Every second we are alive, we are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information, some of which can save our lives, or endanger it.

The brain’s primary function is to make sense of all this information and respond as effectively as possible to all these external stimuli. It also monitors the body’s responses to these stimuli by gathering internal signals that regulate our homeostasis (the ability of a living organism to maintain its internal environment in a state of stable equilibrium, despite constant changes in the external world) and keep us alive.

For example, if the temperature outside is too hot, the temperature receptors in our skin will collect that external stimulus, it will get processed by the brain and we will start sweating, as a result of an internal stimulus. All of this happens without our conscious involvement, for every stimulus that we collect.

The main question is, how does our brain connect all the stimuli into a coherent picture of our surrounding and form a response? What makes us start sweating when it gets too hot?

Brain as an electrically charged sea

The place where everything converges to make sense is the brain. The main culprits are the neurons, with astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and microglia all helping to entangle the multitudes of information pouring in. Neurons in different brain regions are vaguely specialized for different tasks, such as auditory cortex, visual cortex, centre for speech, etc. All of them need to be coordinated to express a thought or to feel a certain way.

Figure 1: Parts of the brain.

To propagate and catalogue those stimuli, neurons use electric charges as means of communication, together with chemicals called neurotransmitters. When the neurons get excited, the electric charge propagates through them, forming waves. Those waves, together with neurotransmitters, are what drives our response to everything, giving us the ability to coalesce even our experiences stored in distant brain regions into one coherent memory, feeling or a response.

Figure 2: An EEG image of the human brain experiencing a wave propagating after a specific stimulus. Coloured parts indicate the regions involved, and the colour indicates intensity, with red being the most intense, while blue is the least intense. Uploaded by Abigail McGarth.

Specific stimuli create specific waves, which trigger specific neurons, and vice versa. This affects specific brain regions, giving us access to the full suite of tools to catalogue and – more importantly – to remember all the complex feelings we intake from our surroundings. The same stimulus will always create very similar (if not the same) waves, giving us similar (if not the same) experiences every time. For example, a finger touching a hot stove will always involve neurons which interpret the temperature receptors on our skin, the pain receptors if it’s too hot and the reflex retraction of lifting the finger from the stove. This “effect wave” will be engrained into our memory so that we know not to do it again when we next see a hot stove. Timing, frequency, direction, intensity and speed of the wave produce specific effects and affect specific neurons, creating very specialized memories! The current generated by the neurons can even produce electrically charged vortices, which can rout information between brain parts with great efficiency. The orchestrator of these waves is a brain region known as the anterior insular cortex, which aligns them with our heart rate, temperature, emotional state and other stimuli the body produces, such as hormones.

Figure 3: Electrically charged vortices on the topographic surface of the brain. Negative charge is represented in blue, while positive charge is represented in red.

Prediction, rather than reaction

The difference between reacting to something rather than predicting it can sometimes be fatal. Somewhere along our evolutionary path, our proto-brains started predicting immediate future events rather than purely reacting to them, which lead to formation of “causal waves”. They draw on our experience, rather than react to present events, constructing predicted reality. This power gave us an evolutionary advantage in terms of microseconds saved on our reaction time to external events, but also significantly lowered the brain’s metabolic needs. Instead of rendering everything around us all the time and trying to make sense of it every living moment, the brain is drawing on previously rendered “causal waves” and matching them to the current situation. In fact, the brain is so energy efficient that it can make sense of everything with a power output of 20 Watts, equivalent to a small light bulb.

Implications

This simple evolutionary switch still has major implications for our everyday lives. It explains why new and exciting things are always more exhausting than known ones – because the brain had no previous experience to draw upon and had to pay attention from start to finish. It also explains why repeating something makes us remember it better: it strengthens that specific wave, and the connection between those specific neurons. However, the same is true both for purposeful repetitions, such as learning, and unconscious repetitions, such as bad habits, belittling yourself or ticks. They all strengthen the neural connections between the excited neurons.

This switch also causes our vision to be continuous, rather than segmented, even as the surrounding conditions drastically change. We keep track of an object continuously when we move our head, we know what is in our surroundings even when we switch the light off, and we know what colour the apple is, even when in dim light. Chickens, on the other hand, don’t experience continuous vision. Rather, they see a new frame every time they move their head.

Desynchronization of those waves causes interesting effects in our bodies. If we are trying to find a specific object, such as car keys, while the standing waves are out of sync – that being the wave of us recalling what the keys look like and the likely place they would be, and the wave generated by our vision – we can experience so called object blindness, where the keys can be in front of our eyes and we wouldn’t be able to perceive them. Only by refocusing on them and looking again (synchronizing the waves) can we find the missing object.

Another implication of the standing waves is the effect anaesthetics have on us, and consequentially, our consciousness. Anaesthetics disrupt the crosstalk between our neurons, collapsing the standing waves. Slow, long waves take over and we fall unconscious.

Future studies on neural connectivity

A lot of studies have been focused on the implications of standing waves in recent years, with big emphasis on researching them in certain neurological conditions. Laboratories across the world are racing to define the difference between waves in healthy individuals versus those with schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, clinical depression and similar conditions, with the main goal of finding a non-invasive treatment that doesn’t rely on drugs.

References:

https://sciencenotes.org/parts-of-the-brain-and-their-functions/
Verzhbinsky, I.A., Daume, J., Cheng, S. et al. Cross-region neuron co-firing mediated by ripple oscillations supports distributed working memory representations. Nat Neurosci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02403-z
Muller L, Busch A, Davis Z ...Neural traveling waves in cortex: Network mechanisms and potential roles in neural computation. Neuron, 2026; 114, 3156-3174
Xu, Y., Long, X., Feng, J. et al. Interacting spiral wave patterns underlie complex brain dynamics and are related to cognitive processing. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1196–1215 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01626-5
Vishne G, Gerber E, Knight R ... Distinct ventral stream and prefrontal cortex representational dynamics during sustained conscious visual perception. Cell Reports, 2023; 42