Oscillatory dynamics as the coordination layer of the organism: waves, Markov blankets, and the virtual space of cognition

Neural oscillations are not a mechanism that implements cognition. We present a new theoretical framework through a synthesis of relevant literature that has emerged in recent years: metabolic activity in the body, including but not limited to neural tissue, gives rise to an oscillatory pattern that contains information accessible to individual cells. The resulting dynamical structure allows cognitive activity to map the body in fine detail, to perceive its surroundings, or to extend into representations of objects and possibilities never encountered in the world. This array of possibilities is enabled by the coordination of the body’s components, which imposes invariant structural regularities among them, in turn creating a moment-to-moment series of states shared across a distributed network of cells. Metabolic success involves ensuring adequate access to nutrition and waste removal for every cell and, when achieved, can give rise to a series of leaps manifested as increased access to complex higher-order affordances. The body’s metabolic activity yields observable coordination; however, the mental actions themselves are inscrutable, existing only within a virtual space that unfolds in the interplay of the constituents of a particular body. Access to advanced functions is categorical; this virtual space expands during development and contracts in response to reduced metabolic sufficiency. Markov blankets formalize this asymmetry: brain-scanning technology clarifies the substrate, but no amount of information about the substrate provides direct access to cognitive activity. Frequency bands of oscillation correspond to spatial scales of inter-blanket communication, with cross-frequency coupling carrying information up and down the nested hierarchy. Several clinical conditions, ME/CFS, Long Coronavirus Disease (COVID), cancer-related cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, and age-related decline, share a common upstream mechanism within this framework: cellular damage degrades the substrate, which contracts the space of accessible cognitive operations and produces the categorical incapacity patients report. The framework generates a testable prediction: aperiodic spectral flattening should temporally precede the loss of specific oscillatory peaks as the substrate degrades.