OsciPod

This episode explores how mice trained to discriminate pulsed sounds showed shared, systematic choice biases even when sounds had the same reinforced pulse count. Seiler and colleagues found that auditory cortex population activity represented four major timing-related sound features, and that entanglement between task-relevant and task-irrelevant feature axes predicted part of the animals' perceptual bias. Reference: Seiler et al. (2026) "Representational geometry of sounds in the auditory cortex explains biases in perceptual decision-making in mice" Cell Reports 45, 117221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117221

This study is the first in the world to reveal that theta waves in the human hippocampus are "traveling waves" that move in a specific direction. Using electrode data implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients, the research team discovered that these vibrations propagate in a specific order from posterior to anterior. Human traveling waves have a wider frequency range compared to those in mice, and their speed changes with frequency. This mechanism allows neurons in different parts of the hippocampus to process information in different phases, playing a crucial role in phase coding for memory and spatial cognition. This finding suggests that the entire hippocampus organizes information temporally and spatially**, efficiently integrating input from the cerebral cortex.J Neurosci. 2015 Sep 9;35(36):12477-87. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5102-14.2015.Traveling Theta Waves in the Human HippocampusH Zhang, J Jacobs