John H. Reynolds
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
John H. Reynolds is a professor at the Salk Institute who has spent his career on the physiology of visual attention and perception. He is known for the normalization model of attention, developed with Geoffrey Heeger, which describes attention as changing the gain of neural responses in a way that follows a normalization rule. That gain-centered view connects directly to his more recent wave work. In the marmoset experiments he co-led with Zachary Davis and Lyle Muller, a faint target’s detectability moved with the phase of the traveling wave crossing cortex, with gain changing by roughly 10 to 20 percent as the wave passed (the site’s analysis of the wave-gating evidence).
The behavioral result carries weight for consciousness science because it ties an intrinsic cortical dynamic, the wave phase at the moment a stimulus arrives, to a perceptual outcome, and it does so in a prepared model whose gain effect can be stated quantitatively. Reynolds is co-senior author of the 2026 Neuron review that synthesizes this literature, alongside the circuit account of how horizontal fibers and delays generate the waves in the first place (Lyle Muller’s profile covers that side). His program treats perception as riding on a moving map of excitability, which makes the wave state of a patch of cortex a measurable variable rather than background noise.
Known for. The normalization model of attention, co-senior authorship of the wave-gated perception finding (Davis et al., Nature 2020), and co-authorship of the 2026 Neuron traveling waves review
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Lyle MullerDepartment of Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Dallas; Fields Lab for Network Computation, Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, TorontoLead author of the 2026 Neuron review of neural traveling waves in cortex, the Benigno wave-prediction model (Nature Communications 2023), the Liboni wave segmentation model (PNAS 2025), and the case against ephaptic wave mechanisms (Box 1 of the review)
- Zachary W. DavisDepartment of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake CityFirst author of the wave-gated perception study (Davis et al., Nature 2020), the sparse-wave model result (Davis et al., Nature Communications 2021), and the feature-selective wave motif recordings (Davis et al., Cell Reports 2024)
- František BaluškaUniversity of BonnCellular consciousness, subcellular nanobrains, plant neurobiology, sentient cells as units of physiology
- Tristan A. BekinschteinDepartment of Psychology / Consciousness and Cognition Lab, University of CambridgeClinical biomarkers of consciousness, local-global auditory paradigm, transitions from wakefulness to sedation, neural dynamics of awareness
- Tomas Berjaga-BuisanComputational Neuroscience Group, Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, BarcelonaNon-equilibrium thermodynamics of whole-brain models, fluctuation-dissipation theorem violations as a non-invasive consciousness marker
- Douglas BlackistonAllen Discovery Center at Tufts UniversityMemory stability during brain remodeling, xenobot platform design, amphibian memory transplantation work
John H. Reynolds 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.