Control mechanisms for brain state transitions - new tools

• Applicant: Dr. Urs Braun
• Subject Area: Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 408280106

Converging evidence supports the notion that human brain function is enabled by highly complex, dynamic interactions between distributed brain regions. Dynamic network neuroscience has become a key instrument to analyze these interactions building on data from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The central idea of dynamic network neuroscience proposes that the brain switches between discrete network or activity states in order to facilitate proper behavioral responses. In recent years, those brain states have been characterized in detail, yet little is known about how the brain actually controls the transitions between different brain states.Here, I propose to investigate those transitions using the recently developed framework of network control theory (NCT). NCT can be used to examine the energy landscape of possible brain states, i.e., (a) which specific states are difficult to access , and even more importantly, (b) which regions need to be perturbed to make those states accessible and (c) how energetic should the perturbation be in order to reach those states. I am going to define several different brain states corresponding to common psychological processes, such as reward processing or emotion regulation, based on their patterns of activity across brain regions in 6 cognitive-emotive fMRI tasks. Using NCT, I will model the brain switches between those experimentally defined states and identify brain regions that are crucial for controlling those transitions. I expect (a) a specific set of brain regions located in frontal-parietal areas to be important for all brain state transitions, and the amount of energy needed to control these transitions in those regions to be associated with external measures in cognitive control tasks. Further, I hypothesize that (b) specific control regions in areas associated with the examined psychological domains to facilitate specific transitions.Our study will shed new light on the questions how the brain controls the orchestrated actions of billions of neurons to enable healthy brain functioning.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Dani Bassett, Ph.D.