The team has identified slow-moving brainwaves it says could be carried only by the brain's gentle electrical field, a mechanism previously thought to be incapable of spreading neural signals altogether.

"Researchers have thought that the brain's endogenous electrical fields are too weak to propagate wave transmission," says Dominique Durand, professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. "But it appears the brain may be using the fields to communicate without synaptic transmissions, gap junctions or diffusion."

What led Durand and her team of researchers to this conclusion was the recording of neural spikes traveling too slowly to be carried by conventional means, indicating something else was at play. They claim that the only possible explanation for the passage of information in this way was the presence of a weak electrical field.

The team tested its theory both by way of computer modeling and observing activity in the hippocampus of a mouse brain, the central region associated with memory and spatial navigation.