ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Broken detailed balance and entropy production in the human brain.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed.
- Thermodynamics of consciousness: Non-equilibrium brain dynamics track conscious states.Cell reports · 2026Article
- Brain network dynamics reflect psychiatric illness status and transdiagnostic symptom profiles across health and disease.Nature communications · 2026Article
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- Three parsimonious spatiotemporal patterns in cerebellum reveal individual traits in function and behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Identification and quantification of irreversibility in stochastic systems.Physical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP · 2026Review
- Harnessing Uncertainty: Improvisation as a Model for Rapid Behavioral Expansion.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Stochastic motility energetics reveals cooperative bacterial swarming in optical tweezers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A Rosetta Stone hypothesis for neurophenomenology: mathematical predictions from predictive processing.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Neg-entropy is the true drug target for chronic diseases.Acta pharmaceutica Sinica. B · 2026Review
- The turbulent brain: Modeling vortex interactions for understanding human cognition.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Shannon Entropy of Gray Matter Eigenmodes: A Novel Biomarker for Alzheimer's Disease and Heterogeneous MCI Trajectories.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Implications of hierarchical Markov models of behavior: on irreversibility, predictability, and dimensionality.Proceedings of the ... Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience · 2026Article
- State-space kinetic Ising model reveals task-dependent entropy flow in sparsely active nonequilibrium neuronal dynamics.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Functional transition rate of the default mode network is associated with self-reported resilience.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Entropy Production and Irreversibility in the Linearized Stochastic Amari Neural Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Reconfiguration of functional brain hierarchy in schizophrenia.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Disrupted hierarchical organization in disorders of consciousness revealed by fluctuation-dissipation deviations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Dynamics of EEG Microstates Change Across the Spectrum of Disorders of Consciousness.Brain topography · 2025Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Living systems break detailed balance at small scales, consuming energy and producing entropy in the environment to perform molecular and cellular functions. However, it remains unclear how broken detailed balance manifests at macroscopic scales and how such dynamics support higher-order biological functions. Here we present a framework to quantify broken detailed balance by measuring entropy production in macroscopic systems. We apply our method to the human brain, an organ whose immense metabolic consumption drives a diverse range of cognitive functions. Using whole-brain imaging data, we demonstrate that the brain nearly obeys detailed balance when at rest, but strongly breaks detailed balance when performing physically and cognitively demanding tasks. Using a dynamic Ising model, we show that these large-scale violations of detailed balance can emerge from fine-scale asymmetries in the interactions between elements, a known feature of neural systems. Together, these results suggest that violations of detailed balance are vital for cognition and provide a general tool for quantifying entropy production in macroscopic systems.
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