Abstract
Scale-free neuronal dynamics and interareal correlations are emergent characteristics of spontaneous brain activity. How such dynamics and the anatomical patterns of neuronal connectivity are mutually related in brain networks has, however, remained unclear. We addressed this relationship by quantifying the network colocalization of scale-free neuronal activity—both neuronal avalanches and long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs)—and functional connectivity (FC) by means of intracranial and noninvasive human resting-state electrophysiological recordings. We found frequency-specific colocalization of scale-free dynamics and FC so that the interareal couplings of LRTCs and the propagation of neuronal avalanches were most pronounced in the predominant pathways of FC. Several control analyses and the frequency specificity of network colocalization showed that the results were not trivial by-products of either brain dynamics or our analysis approach. Crucially, scale-free neuronal dynamics and connectivity also had colocalized modular structures at multiple levels of network organization, suggesting that modules of FC would be endowed with partially independent dynamic states. These findings thus suggest that FC and scale-free dynamics—hence, putatively, neuronal criticality as well—coemerge in a hierarchically modular structure in which the modules are characterized by dense connectivity, avalanche propagation, and shared dynamic states.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 143–165 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Network Neuroscience |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2017 |
Bibliographical note
© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.Funding Information:
This study was supported by the Academy of Finland, Grant Nos. 253130 and 256472 (to J.M.P.) and 1126967 (to S.P.); by the Helsinki University Research Funds and European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No. 29 604102 (Human Brain Project); and by the Italian Ministry of Health, Targeted Research Grant No. RF-2010-2319316 (to L.N.).