Fast Dynamics of Brain-wide Patterns on Neuronal Oscillations

Various neuroimaging techniques and data analytics have been established in studying brain-wide activations in human. However, a significant impediment in studying brain-wide activations have been limited in its temporal resolutions, due to either slow response times in the signal of interest or amount of data required by the special analytics used. To overcome these limitations, we have developed modeling and computational tools for noninvasive electrical imaging of fast brain-wide neuronal activations in human brains from high-density electroencephalography (EEG). Here we report a set of brain-wide co-activation patterns (bwCAPs) at the timescales of tens of milliseconds from dominant resting rhythmic human EEG at the alpha band, which indicate multiple recurring transient brain states and a well-organized transitional structure among them. This is the first time in detecting brain-wide modulating patterns on the well-established neuronal oscillation. Due to the distributed nature of these bwCAPs at the brain-wide scale, their timescales close to the actual neuronal events, and frequency-specific detections, we expect that these phenomena will support future investigations on human cognition noninvasively.