Computing can take advantage of physics-that is, 'whatever physics offers' (Jaeger et al. 2023 Nat. Commun. 14, 4911 (doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40533-1)). One of the key features physics provides is time: it describes rules and makes predictions about how activity patterns change over time, as governed by dynamics. We argue that computing can learn from physics in how it conceives time-namely, in...
The brain displays intrinsic durations in its own spontaneous activity - Intrinsic Neural Timescales (INTs). INTs are hierarchically organized, with shorter durations within unimodal regions and longer intervals in multimodal domains. Despite significant progress, it's currently not known whether the unimodal-multimodal hierarchical organization undergoes recurrent changes itself - consistent...
Meditation encompasses a range of practices employing diverse induction techniques, each characterized by a distinct attentional focus. In Mantra meditation, for instance, practitioners direct their attention narrowly to a given sentence that is recursively repeated, while other forms of meditation such as Shoonya meditation are induced by a wider attentional focus. Here we aimed to identify...
This scientific commentary refers to ‘Brain dynamics predictive of response to psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression’, by Vohryzek et al. (https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcae049)
Time delays are a signature of many physical systems, including the brain, and considerably shape their dynamics; moreover, they play a key role in consciousness, as postulated by the temporo-spatial theory of consciousness (TTC). However, they are often not known a priori and need to be estimated from time series. In this study, we propose the use of permutation entropy (PE) to estimate time...
Scale-free physiological processes are ubiquitous in the human organism. Resting-state functional MRI studies observed the loss of scale-free dynamics under anesthesia. In contrast, the modulation of scale-free dynamics during task-related activity remains an open question. We investigate scale-free dynamics in the cerebral cortex's unimodal periphery and transmodal core topography in rest and...