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Pinging the brain to reveal hidden memories

Nature Neuroscience volume 20, pages 767–769 (2017)Cite this article

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Keeping a picture in mind requires many brain cells to actively communicate ... or does it? There might be more to working memory than neuronal chatter, and silent processes could be hiding right beneath the surface.

It is common folklore to liken the mind to water, probably because the mind has traditionally been a viewed as vast and unknowable—an entity of impenetrable depths. As modern neuroscience is slowly lifting the veil on our mind's innermost workings, such longstanding intuitions may prove to have some merit, albeit in surprising new ways. New work reported in this issue of Nature Neuroscience1 suggests that at least one central component of everyday cognition, namely working memory, relies on brain processes hiding right beneath the surface. The study grants a sneak peek into relatively uncharted brain mechanisms that do not rely on active neural firing, and it demonstrates how such 'activity-silent' hidden states relate to human behavior.

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Figure 1: How to ping a brain.

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  1. Rosanne L. Rademaker and John T. Serences are in the Psychology Department, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA.,

    Rosanne L Rademaker & John T Serences

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  1. Rosanne L Rademaker
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  2. John T Serences
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Correspondence to Rosanne L Rademaker or John T Serences.

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Rademaker, R., Serences, J. Pinging the brain to reveal hidden memories. Nat Neurosci 20, 767–769 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4560

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