Physics

Radiology

Neuroscience

Pedagogy

Nerve net

Functional connectivity

Connectome

Millisecond

Human Connectome Project

Brain activity and meditation

Astronomy

Magnetic resonance imaging

Dynamics (music)

Diffusion MRI

Psychology

Human brain

Computer science

Electroencephalography

Magnetoencephalography

Medicine

Tractography

eLife

Brain activity during rest displays complex, rapidly evolving patterns in space and time. Structural connections comprising the human connectome are hypothesized to impose constraints on the dynamics of this activity. Here, we use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to quantify the extent to which fast neural dynamics in the human brain are constrained by structural connections inferred from diffusion MRI tractography. We characterize the spatio-temporal unfolding of whole-brain activity at the millisecond scale from source-reconstructed MEG data, estimating the probability that any two brain regions will significantly deviate from baseline activity in consecutive time epochs. We find that the structural connectome relates to, and likely affects, the rapid spreading of neuronal avalanches, evidenced by a significant association between these transition probabilities and structural connectivity strengths (r = 0.37, p<0.0001). This finding opens new avenues to study the relationship between brain structure and neural dynamics.

The structural connectome constrains fast brain dynamics