Zachary W. Davis
Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Zachary W. Davis is the experimentalist behind the wave phase and perception result. With Utah arrays implanted in visual area MT of marmosets performing a threshold detection task, his Nature 2020 study found spontaneous traveling waves at roughly 10 per second during fixation, and showed that the phase of the wave when a faint target appeared predicted whether the animal saw it, with perceptual sensitivity peaking at the most excitable phase (Davis et al., Nature 2020). The companion Nature Communications paper with the Muller lab showed that waves emerge in large spiking models from horizontal fiber time delays and travel through locally asynchronous-irregular states, the sparse regime where only a small fraction of neurons fire as the wave passes.
The 2024 Cell Reports paper pushed the structure further, showing that the patchy long-range horizontal connections of cortex shape intrinsic waves into feature-selective motifs, and that a motif’s presence enhances neural and perceptual sensitivity for stimuli matching its preferred motion direction. That result is why the wave literature now argues about features and not just waves. Davis is also a co-author of the 2026 Neuron review that synthesizes the field (the site’s analysis), and his recordings are the empirical backbone of its claims about sparse waves and perception, built with John Reynolds (his profile) and Lyle Muller (his profile).
Known for. First 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)
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)
- John H. ReynoldsThe Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CaliforniaThe 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
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Zachary W. Davis 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.