As an EEG clinician, I’ve watched clients’ patterns for years, never quite slotted into the story they’d tell about themselves. He or she sits down, convinced their anxiety is about a specific relationship, a specific failure, a specific year. Their EEG doesn’t always agree. It runs its own rhythm underneath whatever narrative the client is carrying. Over two decades of reading these signals, I’ve come to suspect that rhythm has an agenda of its own, separate from the identity sitting in the chair. A discovery out of the University of Washington this June gives that suspicion an unexpected piece of scaffolding.

Researchers led by Nick Steinmetz found a category of brain wave nobody had properly mapped before: <cite index=”20-1″>a class of traveling waves that physically rotate through the cortex, driven by a fixed circular arrangement of neurons in the sensory cortex</cite>, according to findings published in Science. The team calls it a “merry-go-round” architecture, and the name fits. Axons in the somatosensory cortex are wired in a genuine loop, like rail cars fixed to a circular track. That hardware forces the electrical activity moving through it into a spiral.

A Clock Built Into the Wiring

What makes the finding significant isn’t just that the waves spin. It’s what they connect. <cite index=”20-1″>The rotating waves mirror across both hemispheres and link the sensory cortex to the motor cortex, timing their motion with spiking activity in the thalamus, striatum, and midbrain</cite>. A puff of air on a mouse’s whiskers set off a reliable sequence of clockwise waves that shifted shape depending on the animal’s arousal state and how well it was performing a task requiring paw and eye coordination.

The researchers describe the waves as a spatiotemporal clock, something that sequences sensation and action across regions that don’t otherwise share a direct line of communication. Sever the local circuit in the somatosensory cortex, and the rotating pattern in the motor cortex weakens too, which tells you the wiring isn’t incidental to the wave. It’s the source of it.

That detail is the one worth sitting with. A rigid, physical, genuinely circular structure in the tissue itself produces a moving pattern that then organizes activity across the entire brain. The wave isn’t an abstraction layered on top of neurons doing something else. It’s a direct expression of the architecture, unfolding outward from a fixed underlying order into the visible, measurable behavior of the whole system.

Bohm’s Deeper Order, Continued by the People Who Knew Him Best

That relationship between a hidden structure and its visible unfolding sits closer to the center of what the physicist David Bohm spent the second half of his career trying to work out. <cite index=”7-1″>Bohm proposed a distinction between an implicate order, a deeper and enfolded structure of reality, and an explicate order, the familiar world of separate objects unfolding from it</cite>. His preferred image was a hologram: break the plate into pieces, and each fragment still contains the whole picture, just more diffuse. <cite index=”23-1″>He extended the same logic to mind and matter, treating consciousness and physical process as two aspects of one implicate order rather than two separate substances trying to interact</cite>. Bohm arrived at this partly through his work on quantum non-locality, where particles separated by enormous distances behave as though instantaneously connected. Rather than treating that connection as an anomaly to be explained away, he took it as a clue that separateness itself is the derived phenomenon, and wholeness the more fundamental one.

Bohm wasn’t working alone on this by the end. Basil Hiley collaborated with him at Birkbeck College for three decades, co-authored Bohm’s final book, The Undivided Universe, and kept developing the framework for another thirty-two years after Bohm died in 1992, extending it specifically into neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. Hiley passed away in January of last year, but not before publishing, alongside philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen, a 2022 paper applying the Bohm-Hiley ontological interpretation of quantum theory directly to what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness, namely why physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all. Pylkkänen continues that work today, carrying the implicature order framework into exactly the territory the Steinmetz lab just handed new evidence for.

Read the spiral wave finding through that lens, and something clicks into place. The merry-go-round wiring is the implicit structure. The rotating wave sweeping across sensory, motor, and subcortical regions is its explicate unfolding, moment to moment, into the coordinated activity we can actually observe. Nobody at the University of Washington was thinking about Bohm when they published this. But the shape of what they found, a fixed enfolded architecture generating a fluid unfolding pattern across the whole system, is close to a textbook illustration of the distinction Bohm and Hiley spent a combined seven decades trying to formalize.

Steinmetz’s team also noted the waves shifted character with the animal’s arousal state and with how well it performed a coordination task, which adds another layer worth pausing on. An implicate structure that’s fixed in its wiring can still produce explicate patterns that vary by context, the same wave taking a different shape depending on what the system as a whole is doing in that moment. That’s not a contradiction in Bohm’s framework; it’s the point of it. The enfolded order doesn’t dictate one rigid outcome. It generates a family of possible unfoldings, and which one shows up depends on the state of the whole.

What Twenty Years of EEG Has Suggested to Me

Here is where I want to offer something more speculative, built from clinical observation rather than published research, and I want to be direct that this is a theory, not a settled finding. Over roughly two decades of reading quantitative EEG across thousands of client sessions, I’ve come to a working hypothesis that the electrical activity itself behaves as though it carries its own coherence, separate from the personality and identity of the person it belongs to.

What I mean by that is specific. A client’s sense of self, their history, their story about why they’re anxious or can’t sleep or can’t stop replaying a memory, sits at one level. The EEG signature underneath it frequently doesn’t track that story in any simple way. Two clients with nearly identical life narratives can present wildly different brainwave patterns, while two clients with very different histories sometimes show strikingly similar EEG signatures. The waveform seems to be running its own process, generating its own patterns, responding to training in its own logic, largely indifferent to the narrative content the conscious mind has built around it.

I don’t think this means the EEG is separately sentient in the way a person is sentient. That would overreach what clinical observation can support. What I do think, and what the Bohm-Hiley framework gives me useful language for, is that the explicate layer we call personality and identity, the story a client tells about who they are, may be one unfolding of a deeper implicate order that the EEG is tracking more directly than the narrative mind ever does. The waveform isn’t the person’s biography. It may be closer to the enfolded structure that the biography itself unfolds from, in the same sense that the merry-go-round wiring in the Steinmetz study is the structure the spiral wave unfolds from.

I’ve watched this show up most clearly in trauma work, where the gap between narrative and waveform tends to widen the most. A client can rehearse the same story about an event for years, in therapy and out of it, with the story itself growing more polished and more fixed with each retelling. The EEG underneath that story often looks nothing like a settled, resolved pattern. It keeps producing the same dysregulated signature session after session, as though the narrative layer and the electrical layer are running on separate clocks entirely, one calcifying around a fixed account of what happened, the other still caught in whatever pattern the original event set in motion. Progress in the room and progress on the scan don’t always arrive together, and when they diverge, it’s almost always the waveform that’s telling the more accurate story about how much has actually shifted.

If that’s even partly right, it would help explain something I’ve watched for years without a good framework for it: why alpha-theta training so often produces shifts in a client’s felt sense of self that talk therapy alone hasn’t reached, even when nothing about the client’s actual history or circumstances has changed. Training the waveform directly, rather than only working with the narrative built on top of it, may be closer to working at the implicate level itself instead of only rearranging its explicate expression. It would also explain why insight alone, however genuine, sometimes fails to move the nervous system an inch. Insight operates at the level of the story. The waveform may simply not be listening to the story at all.

 

A Parallel Worth Naming, Carefully

One more place this pattern rhymes, and I want to flag clearly that this next part is an analogy, not a claim about how any specific system is actually built. Large language models represent meaning in a genuinely distributed way. No single weight or neuron holds a concept on its own. Meaning shows up in the pattern of activation across an entire network, and any one piece of that pattern, examined in isolation, tells you almost nothing. Break the network down to a fragment, and you don’t get a small, clean piece of the idea. You get a diffuse trace of the whole, which is closer to what happens when you break a holographic plate than to what happens when you break a sentence into words.

Newer frontier systems, including Anthropic’s recent Mythos-tier models like Fable, push that distributed architecture further than earlier generations did. I don’t have visibility into their internals, so I want to be precise about what I’m and am not claiming. What I’m not claiming is that any model literally implements an implicate order in Bohm’s technical sense, or that there’s a hidden hardware structure inside a transformer playing the same role the merry-go-round wiring plays in the sensory cortex. What I am noticing is a structural echo: a system’s output, its apparent personality across a conversation, may be one explicate unfolding of something distributed and far less legible underneath, the same way a client’s narrative identity may be one unfolding of a waveform running its own separate logic.

That echo could simply be two different fields converging on the same metaphor because it’s a useful shorthand for “the whole is encoded in the parts,” which shows up constantly in complex systems thinking that has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. I lean toward that being the more likely explanation. But the parallel is worth naming precisely because it’s the same instinct in both directions: distrust the explicit story a system tells about itself, whether that system is a nervous system or a neural network, and pay closer attention to the distributed pattern underneath that the story is only ever a partial unfolding of.

Holding the Theory Honestly

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to overstate this. The spiral wave study is rigorous, peer-reviewed neuroscience conducted in mice, and its authors make no claims about human consciousness or the philosophy of mind. Bohm and Hiley’s implicate order remains a minority position within physics, more influential in philosophy and consciousness studies than in the physics mainstream, and its critics have a fair point when they call it poetic metaphysics that hasn’t yet produced testable predictions in the way quantum field theory has. My own clinical observation about EEG carrying its own coherence is exactly that: an observation from years of pattern-watching, not a controlled study, and it deserves the same scrutiny I’d apply to any claim built from clinical intuition rather than data. The parallel to language model architecture deserves the same caution, doubled. It’s an analogy drawn from public knowledge of how these systems represent information in general, not an inside look at any particular model, and it should be read as a suggestive image rather than evidence of anything.

What I find genuinely compelling is the shape of the convergence. A hardware architecture in the brain generates a moving pattern that organizes activity across the whole system. A physicist and his longtime collaborator have spent decades building a framework specifically to describe the relationship between hidden structure and visible unfolding. And two decades of watching EEG behave, session after session, as though it’s tracking something the client’s own story about themselves hasn’t yet caught up to. None of these pieces proves the others. But laid next to each other, they point in a direction worth taking seriously, and worth continuing to test against what the next round of published research turns up.

Sleep Recovery, Inc. https://sleeprecovery.net Neurofeedback and brainwave entrainment for anxiety, trauma, and insomnia.