Cortical mechanisms of memory formation and readout

Most researchers regard the dasiaspontaneouspsila background activity seen in EEG (scalp electroencephalogram) and ECoG (intracranial electrocorticogram) as noise, to which signals are added by stimuli or by intention to act. Indeed they are noise, but they are not random, and the signals are not added. They emerge by rapid, large-scale reorganization of background activity in the process of perception. Here I show that the background activity of the brain conforms to a modified form of scale-free brown noise - black noise - that is sustained by mutual excitation. Distributed inhibitory feedback operates on the noise as a band pass filter, giving Rayleigh noise in every pass band. The beats trigger the formation of non-random spatiotemporal structures by enabling repetitive phase transitions, through which the microscopic activity patterns of neural populations abruptly re-form upon selection by stimuli into spatial brain wave patterns revealing Rice distributions. The reorganization under sensory guidance constitutes recall of memories stored in synaptic distributions, leading to recognition through transient states of globally patterned brain activity.