The finding, published in Cerebral Cortex, adds to evidence that the brain’s electric fields act as important control signals for underlying brain function.

“The brain is a rollicking sea of electrical influences,” said study co-author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. “But the traditional view of brain function focuses only on the spiking and synaptic connections among individual neurons. Now, there is growing evidence for electric field effects. For instance, in this study we show that neural variability is explained by how ephaptic effects influence neural activity.”