Eric Halgren
University of California, San Diego
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Eric Halgren runs one of the longest-running human intracranial electrophysiology programs, and his 2026 Nature Neuroscience study with first author Ilya Verzhbinsky, Jonathan Daume, Sophia Cheng and Ueli Rutishauser delivered the strongest evidence yet that brief high-frequency ripples coordinate firing between distant brain regions (the site’s analysis). In 35 patients recorded in the hippocampus, amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate and pre-supplementary motor area, ripples near 90 Hz co-occurring between regions were associated with about a 30 percent rise in cross-region co-firing, with no falloff up to 220 millimetres, and the effect scaled with memory load.
The study’s deeper result is content carrying. During retrieval, co-ripples promoted the reinstatement of stimulus-specific co-firing patterns observed during encoding, especially on rapid recognition trials, which makes co-ripples a candidate mechanism for how distributed representations stay coordinated across a working-memory delay. The work builds on Verzhbinsky’s earlier PNAS study showing local ripple-mediated interaction, and it extends the coordination question from millimetre scales to decimetre scales. Whether transient synchrony of this kind is part of how conscious contents get bound, the binding problem the field keeps open, is a theoretical question the data constrain without settling, and the study states its scope inside the recorded regions rather than claiming brain-wide effects.
Known for. Senior author of the 2026 Nature Neuroscience co-ripple study on cross-region neuron co-firing during working memory, and decades of human intracranial work on memory and cognition
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Eric Halgren is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.