Author: Katharina GlombPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 107
Book Description
Spontaneous brain activity, measured under the absence of any overt task, has been investigated under the label of "resting state" for about 20 years with rising interest. While it was known since the beginnings of modern electrophysiology that the brain exhibits spontaneous fluctuations also during rest, the discovery, in 1995, that these fluctuations possess a robust spatio-temporal structure had a profound impact on how we understand and investigate brain activity. In this dissertation, we characterize the spatio-temporal dynamics of resting state on a macroscopic level using fMRI recordings from humans and combining novel data analysis tools with theoretical models on the level of the whole brain. We demonstrate the presence of common patterns of functional connectivity, known as resting state networks (RSNs), that evolve in time in both empirical and model data. We show that spontaneous fluctuations and their statistics are determined by the structure of the brain network and its dynamics.
