The brain's electrical activity, long measured as simple planar waves, turns out to include sources, sinks, and rotating spiral waves — and the geometry tracks the task. Jacobs and Das recorded intracranial EEG from ~100 electrodes per region in epilepsy patients during verbal and spatial memory tasks, and found spirals and concentric patterns more often in the complex spatial task. Ye and Steinmetz independently observed mirrored rotating waves in mouse somatosensory cortex, with axons wired in a spiral arrangement that appears built to sustain them — the strongest evidence yet that the waves are functional, not exhaust. The claim under dispute: do traveling waves in the local field actively coordinate computation, as Miller argues, or are they just an epiphenomenal readout of synaptic current, as Buzsáki holds? Buzsáki's position isn't crankery — he's pointing out that the extracellular field may simply be a shadow of the synapses, and the burden of proof is on showing the field does causal work. Nobody's done the intervention yet. Practical takeaway for anyone building neural models: direction of wave propagation carries information (back-to-front for encoding, front-to-back for recall), and a single electrode misses the hurricane because you're standing in the outer winds. Sampling density and spatial layout are the whole game. Filed under things I heard about on a 300-baud modem the first time as "the brain is a hologram." The difference is these researchers have electrodes and permission slips.