What are Gamma waves?
Gamma waves are high-frequency neural oscillations (30-100+ Hz) associated with conscious perception, attention, working memory, and the binding of information across brain regions into unified experiences.
How it works
Gamma oscillations are thought to solve the binding problem: how the brain integrates separately processed features (color, shape, motion) into a unified percept of an object. Synchronized gamma activity across brain regions creates temporal windows where neural signals from different areas can be integrated. Gamma activity increases during focused attention, memory encoding, and conscious awareness. Reduced gamma synchrony is observed in schizophrenia and may contribute to the fragmented perception characteristic of the disorder.
Applied example
When a person recognizes a familiar face in a crowd, gamma oscillations synchronize across visual areas processing different features (eyes, nose, mouth) and memory areas storing the identity, binding these separate processes into the unified experience of recognition.
Why it matters
Gamma waves represent the brain’s mechanism for creating coherent conscious experience from the distributed processing of information across specialized brain regions.
