Catz Fellow marks 100 years of the alpha rhythm

One hundred years after its discovery, Professor Ole Jensen, St Catherine’s Fellow and Chair of Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, has co-authored a major review revisiting one of the brain’s most fundamental signals: the alpha rhythm.

First identified by Hans Berger in 1924, the alpha rhythm is the dominant non-invasive electrophysiological signature of the healthy, awake human brain. For decades, it was thought to reflect rest or ‘idling’. That view changed in the early 2000s.

Researchers discovered that alpha oscillations increase with cognitive demands. Rather than signalling inactivity, they actively suppress brain regions that are not needed for a task, directing information to areas that are. “Alpha activity was originally thought to reflect a passive brain,” says Professor Jensen. “We now understand it as an active control mechanism that helps the brain allocate its computational resources efficiently.”

Published in Physiological Reviews, one of the field’s leading journals, the review synthesises research across physiology, computational modelling and cognitive neuroscience. It outlines the biological mechanisms that generate alpha oscillations, explains how they emerge in realistic brain networks, and shows how they are modulated across almost every cognitive paradigm tested in humans. At the behavioural level, alpha rhythms track how the brain distributes attention. Studies of individuals with attention-related difficulties show impaired modulation of alpha activity, linked to performance deficits.“Understanding alpha oscillations gives us a window into how the brain regulates attention,” says co-author Mathilde Bonnefond. “It also opens up important questions about ageing, ADHD, and cognitive development.”

The review also highlights how technological advances now allow researchers to measure alpha activity in more naturalistic, real-world settings and across the lifespan, moving beyond tightly controlled laboratory tasks.

A century on, the alpha rhythm remains central to our understanding of how the brain works. This new synthesis sets the agenda for the next phase of research.

St Catz congratulates Professor Jensen on this significant publication, which reflects both his intellectual leadership in the field and the strength of research within the College.

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You can read the paper here.

Find out more about Professor Jensen here.