Altered coordination between the default mode, central executive, and salience networks is linked to schizophrenia, but its role in earlier at-risk stages is unclear. Using dynamic functional connectivity and co-activation pattern analysis of resting-state fMRI, this study examined right anterior insula interactions in 19 individuals with subthreshold delusions and hallucinations (UHR), 28 with basic symptoms of self-experienced subclinical disturbances (BS), and 29 healthy controls. The right anterior insula governs transitions from the central executive to default mode network, which become dysfunctional before psychosis onset, especially when attenuated psychotic symptoms emerge.
In people with progressive multiple sclerosis, brain function changes are not well understood, but studying them could reveal more about how the disease works at this stage.
Adolescents born very preterm (before 32 weeks) showed reduced executive and socioemotional functioning compared to full-term controls. After an 8-week mindfulness-based intervention, their scores on these measures improved significantly. The improvement in executive functioning was linked to reliable changes in the duration of activation of several large-scale brain networks during rest, including frontolimbic, amygdala-hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal, and visual networks. These networks are involved in self-regulation, attentional control, and awareness of sensory stimuli.
During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, the brain's large-scale functional networks show a surprising pattern: nearly all networks are most active during NREM stage 2, then abruptly lose activity in NREM stage 3. However, despite this high activity in stage 2, the functional connections and mutual dependencies between networks progressively break down as sleep deepens. This means that even though networks attempt to communicate during stage 2, the efficiency of information transfer is low. The findings advance neural models of sleep and consciousness by showing that network integrity, not just activity levels, is crucial for conscious awareness.