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Mechanisms of Resting-State Brain Activity Emergence

Determine the mechanisms by which brain activity emerges during human resting-state conditions, as observed with blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging, to elucidate how spontaneous brain dynamics arise in the absence of explicit tasks.

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Background

The paper emphasizes that, despite advances in mapping functional organization and employing deep learning to model hierarchical brain function, fundamental questions persist regarding the origin of brain activity during rest. Resting-state fMRI captures spontaneous BOLD fluctuations without externally imposed tasks, yet the generative mechanisms for these dynamics remain unresolved.

Clarifying how resting-state activity emerges is essential for understanding cognition and neurological disorders, and for informing models that aim to predict or simulate brain states. The authors situate this unresolved issue as a key scientific gap motivating their exploration of predictive modeling approaches.

References

While recent deep learning approaches to model the hierarchical organization of brain function have become critical achievements in the field [13, 14], the question of how brain activity emerges even when we are not performing a specific task (i.e., resting state) still remains unanswered [15].

— Predicting Human Brain States with Transformer (2412.19814 - Sun et al., 11 Dec 2024) in Section 1 (Introduction)