morten kringelbach

Surviving and thriving in a complex world require intricate balancing of higher order brain functions with essential survival-related behaviours. Exactly how this is achieved is not fully understood but a large body of work has shown that different regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) play key roles for diverse cognitive and emotional tasks including emotion, control, response inhibition, mental set shifting and working memory. We hypothesised that the key regions are hierarchically organised and we developed a framework for discovering the driving brain regions at the top of the hierarchy, responsible for steering the brain dynamics of higher brain function...

Characterising brain states during tasks is common practice for many neuroscientific experiments using electrophysiological modalities such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Brain states are often described in terms of oscillatory power and correlated brain activity, i.e. functional connectivity. It is, however, not unusual to observe weak task induced functional connectivity alterations in the presence of strong task induced power modulations using classical time-frequency representation of the data...

Disorders of consciousness are complex conditions characterised by persistent loss of responsiveness due to brain injury. They present diagnostic challenges and limited options for treatment, and highlight the urgent need for a more thorough understanding of how human consciousness arises from coordinated neural activity. The increasing availability of multimodal neuroimaging data has given rise to a wide range of clinically- and scientifically-motivated modelling efforts, seeking to improve data-driven stratification of patients, to identify causal mechanisms for patient pathophysiology and loss of consciousness more broadly, and to develop simulations as a means of testing in silico potential treatment avenues to restore consciousness...

Brain states are frequently represented using a unidimensional scale measuring the richness of subjective experience (level of consciousness). This description assumes a mapping between the high-dimensional space of whole-brain configurations and the trajectories of brain states associated with changes in consciousness, yet this mapping and its properties remain unclear. We combine whole-brain modeling, data augmentation, and deep learning for dimensionality reduction to determine a mapping representing states of consciousness in a low-dimensional space, where distances parallel similarities between states...

Ancient and culturally universal, dance pervades many areas of life and has multiple benefits. In this article, we provide a conceptual framework and systematic review, as a guide for researching the neuroscience of dance. We identified relevant articles following PRISMA guidelines, and summarised and evaluated all original results. We identified avenues for future research in: the interactive and collective aspects of dance; groove; dance performance; dance observation; and dance therapy. Furthermore, the interactive and collective aspects of dance constitute a vital part of the field but have received almost no attention from a neuroscientific perspective so far...

The developing brain has to adapt to environmental and intrinsic insults after extremely preterm (EPT) birth. Ongoing maturational processes maximize their fit to the environment and this can provide a substrate for neurodevelopmental failures. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to scan 33 children born EPT, at < 27 weeks of gestational age, and 26 full-term controls at 10 years of age. We studied the capability of a brain area to propagate neural information (intrinsic ignition) and its variability across time (node-metastability)...

Life is a constant battle against equilibrium. From the cellular level to the macroscopic scale, living organisms as dissipative systems require the violation of their detailed balance, i.e. metabolic enzymatic reactions, in order to survive. We present a framework based on temporal asymmetry as a measure of non-equilibrium. By means of statistical physics, it was discovered that temporal asymmetries establish an arrow of time useful for assessing the reversibility in human brain time series. Previous studies in human and non-human primates have shown that decreased consciousness states such as sleep and anaesthesia result in brain dynamics closer to the equilibrium...

Spatiotemporal oscillations underlie all cognitive brain functions. Large-scale brain models, constrained by neuroimaging data, aim to trace the principles underlying such macroscopic neural activity from the intricate and multi-scale structure of the brain. Despite substantial progress in the field, many aspects about the mechanisms behind the onset of spatiotemporal neural dynamics are still unknown. In this work we establish a simple framework for the emergence of complex brain dynamics, including high-dimensional chaos and travelling waves...

The treatment of neurodegenerative diseases is hindered by lack of interventions capable of steering multimodal whole-brain dynamics towards patterns indicative of preserved brain health. To address this problem, we combined deep learning with a model capable of reproducing whole-brain functional connectivity in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). These models included disease-specific atrophy maps as priors to modulate local parameters, revealing increased stability of hippocampal and insular dynamics as signatures of brain atrophy in AD and bvFTD, respectively...

Schizophrenia is a debilitating neuropsychiatric disorder whose underlying correlates remain unclear despite decades of neuroimaging investigation. One contentious topic concerns the role of global signal (GS) fluctuations and how they affect more focal functional changes. Moreover, it has been difficult to pinpoint causal mechanisms of circuit disruption. Here, we analyzed resting-state fMRI data from 47 schizophrenia patients and 118 age-matched healthy controls and used dynamical analyses to investigate how global fluctuations and other functional metastable states are affected by this disorder...

BACKGROUND: An increasing number of trials indicate that treatment outcomes in cancer patients with metastatic disease are improved when targeted treatments are matched with druggable genomic alterations in individual patients (pts). An estimated 30-80% of advanced solid tumors harbor actionable genomic alterations. However, the efficacy of personalized cancer treatment is still scarcely investigated in larger, controlled trials due to the low frequency and heterogenous distribution of druggable alterations among different histologic tumor types...

A topic of growing interest in computational neuroscience is the discovery of fundamental principles underlying global dynamics and the self-organization of the brain. In particular, the notion that the brain operates near criticality has gained considerable support, and recent work has shown that the dynamics of different brain states may be modeled by pairwise maximum entropy Ising models at various distances from a phase transition, i.e., from criticality. Here we aim to characterize two brain states (psychedelics-induced and placebo) as captured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), with features derived from the Ising spin model formalism (system temperature, critical point, susceptibility) and from algorithmic complexity...

Healthy brain dynamics can be understood as the emergence of a complex system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Brain dynamics are temporally irreversible and thus establish a preferred direction in time (i.e., arrow of time). However, little is known about how the time-reversal symmetry of spontaneous brain activity is affected by Alzheimer's disease (AD). We hypothesized that the level of irreversibility would be compromised in AD, signaling a fundamental shift in the collective properties of brain activity toward equilibrium dynamics...

Memory is a complex cognitive process composed of several subsystems, namely short- and long-term memory and working memory (WM). Previous research has shown that adequate interaction between subsystems is crucial for successful memory processes such as encoding, storage, and manipulation of information. However, few studies have investigated the relationship between different subsystems at the behavioral and neural levels. Thus, here we assessed the relationship between individual WM abilities and brain activity underlying the recognition of previously memorized auditory sequences...

A central question in neuroscience is how consciousness arises from the dynamic interplay of brain structure and function. Here we decompose functional MRI signals from pathological and pharmacologically-induced perturbations of consciousness into distributed patterns of structure-function dependence across scales: the harmonic modes of the human structural connectome. We show that structure-function coupling is a generalisable indicator of consciousness that is under bi-directional neuromodulatory control...

Identifying the functional specialization of the brain has moved from using cognitive tasks and resting state to using ecological relevant, naturalistic movies. We leveraged a large-scale neuroimaging dataset to directly investigate the hierarchical reorganization of functional brain activity when watching naturalistic films compared to performing seven cognitive tasks and resting. A thermodynamics-inspired whole-brain model paradigm revealed the generative underlying mechanisms for changing the balance in causal interactions between brain regions in different conditions...

Traditionally, in neuroimaging, model-free analyses are used to find significant differences between brain states via signal detection theory. Depending on the a priori assumptions about the underlying data, different spatio-temporal features can be analysed. Alternatively, model-based techniques infer features from the data and compare significance from model parameters. However, to assess transitions from one brain state to another remains a challenge in current paradigms. Here, we introduce a "Dynamic Sensitivity Analysis" framework that quantifies transitions between brain states in terms of stimulation ability to rebalance spatio-temporal brain activity towards a target state such as healthy brain dynamics...

Human behavior and cognitive function correlate with complex patterns of spatio-temporal brain dynamics, which can be simulated using computational models with different degrees of biophysical realism. We used a data-driven optimization algorithm to determine and classify the types of local dynamics that enable the reproduction of different observables derived from functional magnetic resonance recordings. The phase space analysis of the resulting equations revealed a predominance of stable spiral attractors, which optimized the similarity to the empirical data in terms of the synchronization, metastability, and functional connectivity dynamics...

Scientific theories on the functioning and dysfunction of the human brain require an understanding of its development-before and after birth and through maturation to adulthood-and its evolution. Here we bring together several accounts of human brain evolution by focusing on the central role of oxygen and brain metabolism. We argue that evolutionary expansion of human transmodal association cortices exceeded the capacity of oxygen delivery by the vascular system, which led these brain tissues to rely on nonoxidative glycolysis for additional energy supply...

Auditory recognition is a crucial cognitive process that relies on the organization of single elements over time. However, little is known about the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying the conscious recognition of auditory sequences varying in complexity. To study this, we asked 71 participants to learn and recognize simple tonal musical sequences and matched complex atonal sequences while their brain activity was recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Results reveal qualitative changes in neural activity dependent on stimulus complexity: recognition of tonal sequences engages hippocampal and cingulate areas, whereas recognition of atonal sequences mainly activates the auditory processing network...