Sepideh Sadaghiani, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Illinois, will lecture on “The functional connectome across temporal scales” at 4:00 pm in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom October 26, 2022. One of our MBM trainees will give an introduction.
The lecture is free and open to the public courtesy of the Miniature Brain Machinery Program. Zoom details are below.
Abstract:
The view of human brain function has drastically shifted over the last decade, owing to the observation that most brain activity is intrinsic rather than driven by external stimuli or cognitive demands. Specifically, all brain regions continuously communicate in spatiotemporally organized patterns that constitute the functional connectome, with consequences for cognition and behavior.
In this talk, I will argue that another shift is underway, driven by new insights from synergistic interrogation of the functional connectome using different acquisition methods. The human functional connectome is typically investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that relies on the indirect hemodynamic signal, thereby emphasizing very slow connectivity across brain regions. Conversely, more recent methodological advances demonstrate that fast connectivity within the whole-brain connectome can be studied with real-time methods such as electroencephalography (EEG).
Our findings show that combining fMRI with scalp or intracranial EEG in humans, especially when recorded concurrently, paints a multiplex picture of neural communication across the connectome. Specifically, the connectome comprises both fast, oscillation-based connectivity observable with EEG, as well as extremely slow processes best captured by fMRI. While the fast and slow processes share an important degree of spatial organization, these processes unfold in a temporally independent manner.
Our observations suggest that infraslow connectivity (measured in fMRI) and rapid connectivity of various frequency bands (measured by EEG) constitute multiple dynamic trajectories through a shared state space of discrete connectome configurations. The multitude of flexible trajectories may enable any given brain region to concurrently connect to multiple sets of other regions.
