The brain—awake and sleeping—is awash in electrical activity, and not just from the individual pings of single neurons communicating with each other. In fact, the brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. The fields were once thought to be a 'bug' of sorts, occurring during neural communication. New work, however, suggests that the fields do much more—and that they may, in fact, represent an additional form of neural communication.

Two Caltech researchers—David Anderson and Christof Koch—have been named by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation among the inaugural group of Allen Distinguished Investigators. The foundation's new program aims to advance important research in neuroscience and cellular engineering.

Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch, postdoc Moran Cerf, and their colleagues have found that individuals can exert conscious control over single neurons in the brain—despite the neurons' location in a brain region previously thought inaccessible to conscious control—and manipulate the behavior of an image on a computer screen.

When it comes to making choices, say Caltech's Antonio Rangel and his colleagues, much depends on which items catch—and keep—your eye. "We're interested in how the brain makes simple choices, like which item to pick from a buffet table," says Rangel, professor of neuroscience and economics. "Why is it that when we look at the buffet table, our gaze shifts back and forth between the items in order to make a choice? What is the role of visual attention in all this?"