To produce your thoughts and actions, your brain processes information in a hierarchy of regions along its surface, or cortex, ranging from “lower” areas that do basic parsing of incoming sensations to “higher” executive regions that formulate your plans for employing that newfound knowledge. In a new study, MIT neuroscientists seeking to explain how this organization emerges report two broad trends: In each of three distinct regions, information encoding or its inhibition was associated with a similar tug of war between specific brain wave frequency bands, and the higher a…
