ArticleNature human behaviour2023
Interacting spiral wave patterns underlie complex brain dynamics and are related to cognitive processing.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- The entropic brain today.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Review
- Traveling waves along the cortical depth reflect structured synaptic inputs.Research square · 2026Article
- Quantifying the spatiotemporal mechanical dynamics of engineered cardiac microbundles.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Three parsimonious spatiotemporal patterns in cerebellum reveal individual traits in function and behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A geometry aware framework enhances noninvasive mapping of whole human brain dynamics.Nature biomedical engineering · 2026Article
- Planar, spiral, and concentric traveling waves distinguish behavioral states in human memory.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Nested spatiotemporal theta-gamma waves organize hierarchical processing across the mouse visual cortex.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Developmental variations in recurrent spatiotemporal brain propagations from childhood to adulthood.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neural Coding of Multiple Linguistic Components During Reading Comprehension Across Development.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- The turbulent brain: Modeling vortex interactions for understanding human cognition.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Article
- A mega-analysis of low frequency resting-state measures in mood and psychosis-spectrum disorders.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Traveling waves link human visual and frontal cortex during working memory-guided behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal dynamics of sleep spindles form spiral waves that predict overnight memory consolidation and age-related memory decline.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Metastability demystified - the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Evidence of universal conformal invariance in living biological matter.Nature physics · 2025Article
- Cortex-wide spatiotemporal motifs of theta oscillations are coupled to freely moving behavior.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2025Article
- Extracting interpretable signatures of whole-brain dynamics through systematic comparison.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The large-scale activity of the human brain exhibits rich and complex patterns, but the spatiotemporal dynamics of these patterns and their functional roles in cognition remain unclear. Here by characterizing moment-by-moment fluctuations of human cortical functional magnetic resonance imaging signals, we show that spiral-like, rotational wave patterns (brain spirals) are widespread during both resting and cognitive task states. These brain spirals propagate across the cortex while rotating around their phase singularity centres, giving rise to spatiotemporal activity dynamics with non-stationary features. The properties of these brain spirals, such as their rotational directions and locations, are task relevant and can be used to classify different cognitive tasks. We also demonstrate that multiple, interacting brain spirals are involved in coordinating the correlated activations and de-activations of distributed functional regions; this mechanism enables flexible reconfiguration of task-driven activity flow between bottom-up and top-down directions during cognitive processing. Our findings suggest that brain spirals organize complex spatiotemporal dynamics of the human brain and have functional correlates to cognitive processing.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.