The Metastable Brain

By Emmanuelle Tognoli, J. A. S. Kelso. Neuron, 2014

683 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neural ensembles oscillate across a broad range of frequencies and are transiently coupled or “bound” together when people attend to a stimulus, perceive, think and act. This is a dynamic, self-assembling process, with parts of the brain engaging and disengaging in time. But how is it done? The theory of Coordination Dynamics proposes a mechanism called metastability, a subtle blend of integration and segregation. Tendencies for brain regions to express their individual autonomy and specialized functions (segregation, modularity) coexist with tendencies to couple and coordinate globally for multiple functions (integration). Although metastability has garnered increasing attention, it has yet to be demonstrated and treated within a fully spatiotemporal perspective. Here, we illustrate metastability in continuous neural and behavioral recordings, and we discuss theory and experiments at multiple scales suggesting that metastable dynamics underlie the real-time coordination necessary for the brain's dynamic cognitive, behavioral and social functions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29d62b74dbaf2437d6cb12a36eee59b67a9f5725

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Citations in the corpus

Criticality in the brain: A synthesis of neurobiology, models and cognition. (2017, background): “This type of behaviour is called multistability (Freyer et al., 2011; Tognoli and Kelso, 2014).”
Functional connectivity dynamically evolves on multiple time-scales over a static structural connectome: Models and mechanisms (2017, background): “This resting state is particularly interesting from the perspective of dynamical systems because it appears to reflect an exploration of the dynamical repertoire of macro-scale brain states arising from the same neuroanatomical structure (Tognoli and Kelso, 2014, Deco and Kringelbach, 2016).”
The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes (2017, background): “Though constitutively involving the environment to close the sensorimotor loop, the use of SMCs is supported on the brain side by metastable neurodynamic structures in conjunction with metastable states in other non-neural systems in the body (see e.g., Tognoli and Kelso 2014).”
EEG microstates as a tool for studying the temporal dynamics of whole‐brain neuronal networks: A review (2017, background): “At the sensor level, such phase-locked activity leads to stable topography (Tognoli and Kelso, 2014).”
The dynamics of resting fluctuations in the brain: metastability and its dynamical cortical core (2016, neutral): “Efficient task-related brain activity has been shown to rely on meta-stability of spontaneous brain activity allowing for optimal exploration of the dynamical repertoire 22 but it is not known if this metastability is maximally metastable 6 .”
The Dynamics of Functional Brain Networks: Integrated Network States during Cognitive Task Performance (2015, neutral): “6 Neuron 92, 1–11, October 19, 2016 need for global coordination and integration (Tognoli and Kelso, 2014).”
The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs (2014, background): “In the present context, the “metastabil-ity” (Tognoli and Kelso, 2014) of a brain network is a measure of the variance in the network’s intrinsic synchrony over time.”
The time-evolving epileptic brain network: concepts, definitions, accomplishments, perspectives (2024, background): “…2011; Bick and Field, 2017; Morrison and Young, 2022; Meyer-Ortmanns, 2023) multistability (Lopes da Silva et al., 2003; Takeshita et al., 2007; Rothkegel and Lehnertz, 2009; Breakspear, 2017; Pisarchik and Hramov, 2022), and metastability (Kelso, 2012; Tognoli and Kelso, 2014; Rossi et al., 2023).”
Mechanisms and Controversies of tACS (Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation) (2024, background): “Metastability is a dynamical systems explanation for intermittent synchronization, which may manifest in part as intermittently emerging macroscopic oscillations across scales (Tognoli & Kelso, 2009; Tognoli & Kelso, 2014; Tognoli et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2020).”