Awake cortex stabilizes traveling waves for global and reliable information routing

How does the brain organize neural information for perception during wakefulness, yet lose such organization under anesthesia? Theories on consciousness hypothesize that perceptual experience arises from global communication across the cerebral cortex. However, the neural substrate that mediates information transfer between cortical regions remains uncertain. Here, developing large-scale and high-density electrocorticography arrays, we demonstrated that traveling waves serve as a fundamental mode for global information transfer. Compared with the anesthetized state, visual-evoked traveling waves during wakefulness exhibited greater stability. Hierarchical clustering uncovered the emergence of widespread waves with a rich repertoire of motifs only in the awake state. By quantifying the fidelity of information routing, we found that information flows more reliably along the direction of wave propagation during wakefulness than under anesthesia. This study provides meso- and macroscopic evidence consistent with theories of consciousness and introduces a framework, informational tuning, for characterizing the geometrical relations between neural and informational flows.