ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Hierarchical dynamics as a macroscopic organizing principle of the human brain.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 157 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
157 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A methodological guideline for consciousness assessment via neural electrophysiological activity.Military Medical Research · 2025Guideline
- Resting-state network alterations in depression: a comprehensive meta-analysis of functional connectivity.Psychological medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Macroscale Gradient Dysfunction in Alzheimer's Disease: Patterns With Cognition Terms and Gene Expression Profiles.Human brain mapping · 2024Pooled it
- Functional gradient reorganization and transcriptomic signatures underlying 1 Hz rTMS treatment in first-episode schizophrenia following right orbitofrontal cortex stimulation.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Trial
- Mindful attention promotes control of brain network dynamics for self-regulation and discontinues the past from the present.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- Distinct electroencephalography alpha-band rhythms map macroscale brain gradients.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Comprehensive profiling of brain dynamics during anesthesia across phylogeny.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Intrinsic timescale develops hierarchically from sensorimotor to association cortex in youth and stabilizes in adulthood.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Preserved intrinsic neural timescale organization with hierarchical variation in autism spectrum disorder.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Human cortex organizes dynamic co-fluctuations along the sensorimotor-association axis.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Brain network dynamics reflect psychiatric illness status and transdiagnostic symptom profiles across health and disease.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Characteristic spatiotemporal features of large-scale functional network architecture in posttraumatic stress disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Neural timescales from a computational perspective.Nature neuroscience · 2026Review
- Neuromorphic hierarchical modular reservoirs.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Correlation of thalamic functional organization disturbances and genetic architecture in motor subtypes of Parkinson's disease.NPJ Parkinson's disease · 2026Article
- Categorization is 'baked' into the brain.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Large-scale brain dynamics are organized by a directional coordination hierarchy.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Three parsimonious spatiotemporal patterns in cerebellum reveal individual traits in function and behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Age Differences in Hippocampal Neural Timescales During Movie-Viewing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Facing trauma under the influence of psychedelics: A phenomenological study with Nova rave survivors.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
97 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Multimodal evidence suggests that brain regions accumulate information over timescales that vary according to anatomical hierarchy. Thus, these experimentally defined "temporal receptive windows" are longest in cortical regions that are distant from sensory input. Interestingly, spontaneous activity in these regions also plays out over relatively slow timescales (i.e., exhibits slower temporal autocorrelation decay). These findings raise the possibility that hierarchical timescales represent an intrinsic organizing principle of brain function. Here, using resting-state functional MRI, we show that the timescale of ongoing dynamics follows hierarchical spatial gradients throughout human cerebral cortex. These intrinsic timescale gradients give rise to systematic frequency differences among large-scale cortical networks and predict individual-specific features of functional connectivity. Whole-brain coverage permitted us to further investigate the large-scale organization of subcortical dynamics. We show that cortical timescale gradients are topographically mirrored in striatum, thalamus, and cerebellum. Finally, timescales in the hippocampus followed a posterior-to-anterior gradient, corresponding to the longitudinal axis of increasing representational scale. Thus, hierarchical dynamics emerge as a global organizing principle of mammalian brains.
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