Brain-wide topographic coordination of traveling spiral waves

Abstract

Traveling waves of activity are a prevalent phenomenon within neural networks of diverse brain regions and species, and have been implicated in myriad brain functions including sensory perception, memory, spatial navigation, and motor control. However, their spatial organization, anatomical basis, and whether they are locally confined versus distributed across the brain, remains unclear. Here we used cortex-wide imaging and large-scale electrophysiology in awake mice to reveal the organization of traveling waves across spatial scales. Traveling waves formed spiral patterns predominantly centered on somatosensory cortex, sweeping across somatotopic maps. Strikingly, the local axonal architecture of neurons in sensory cortex exhibited a matching circular arrangement. At the cortex-wide scale, these spiral waves were mirrored between hemispheres and between sensory and motor cortex, reflecting topographic long-range axons. At the brain-wide scale, cortical spiral waves were coordinated with subcortical spiking patterns in the thalamus, striatum, and midbrain. These results establish that traveling waves are shaped by axonal pathways into coordinated spiral patterns that globally impact neural activity across diverse brain systems, revealing a distributed, multi-sensory organizational principle for propagating neural activity.