What Does the Brain Do when It Does Nothing?

Event Abstract Back to Event What does the brain do when it does nothing? Stuart Knock1* 1 Hospital Carlos Haya, Avenida Carlos Haya 82, Laboratorio de Medicina Regenerativa, Fundación IMABIS, Spain Traditionally brain function is studied through measuring physiological responses in controlled sensory, motor and cognitive paradigms. However, even at rest, in absence of overt goal-directed behavior, collections of cortical regions consistently show temporally coherent activity. In humans, these resting state networks have been shown to greatly overlap with functional architectures present during consciously directed activity, which motivates the interpretation of rest activity as day dreaming, free association, stream of consciousness and inner rehearsal. In monkeys, it has been shown though that similar coherent fluctuations are present during deep anaesthesia when there is no consciousness. Here, we show that comparable resting state networks emerge from a stability analysis of the network dynamics using biologically realistic primate brain connectivity, although anatomical information alone does not identify the network. We specifically demonstrate that noise and time delays via propagation along connecting fibres are essential for the emergence of the coherent fluctuations of the default network. The spatiotemporal network dynamics evolves on multiple temporal scales and displays the intermittent neuroelectric oscillations in the fast frequency regimes, 1-100Hz, commonly observed in electroencephalographic (EEG) and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings, as well as the hemodynamic oscillations in the ultraslow regimes, <0.1Hz, observed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The combination of anatomical structure and time delays creates a space-time structure, in which the neural noise enables the brain to explore various functional configurations representing its dynamic repertoire. Conference: 3rd Mediterranean Conference of Neuroscience , Alexandria, Egypt, 13 Dec - 16 Dec, 2009. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Symposium 01 – Neural dynamics, learning and functional recovery Citation: Knock S (2009). What does the brain do when it does nothing?. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: 3rd Mediterranean Conference of Neuroscience . doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.01.2009.16.008 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 18 Nov 2009; Published Online: 18 Nov 2009. * Correspondence: Stuart Knock, Hospital Carlos Haya, Avenida Carlos Haya 82, Laboratorio de Medicina Regenerativa, Fundación IMABIS, 13331 Marseille, Spain, stuart.knock@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Stuart Knock Google Stuart Knock Google Scholar Stuart Knock PubMed Stuart Knock Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.