Why is everyone talking about brain state?

• Published in: Trends in neurosciences (Regular ed.) Vol. 46; no. 7; pp. 508 - 524
• Main Authors: Greene, Abigail S., Horien, Corey, Barson, Daniel, Scheinost, Dustin, Constable, R. Todd
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.07.2023
• Subjects: arousal; Brain - physiology; Cognition - physiology; Humans; integrative neuroscience; multiscale analysis; neural dynamics; Neurosciences; spontaneous activity; neural dynamics; spontaneous activity; multiscale analysis; integrative neuroscience; arousal
• ISSN: 0166-2236; 1878-108X; 1878-108X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2023.04.001

Recent advances in neuroscientific data acquisition and analysis have permitted novel insights into neural dynamics.These advances have motivated substantial interest in the concept of 'brain state', but approaches differ in spatial and temporal scale, yielding siloed lines of inquiry and subfield-specific definitions of a brain state.We describe how a unified concept of brain state as a whole-brain activity pattern that emerges from, and has consequences for, physiology and/or behavior holds the promise of integrating these levels of analysis, organizing fast-growing literatures, and permitting a more comprehensive characterization of neural dynamics.We explore how this conceptualization of brain state can guide future integrative work to reveal the biology underlying brain dynamics in health and disease. The rapid and coordinated propagation of neural activity across the brain provides the foundation for complex behavior and cognition. Technical advances across neuroscience subfields have advanced understanding of these dynamics, but points of convergence are often obscured by semantic differences, creating silos of subfield-specific findings. In this review we describe how a parsimonious conceptualization of brain state as the fundamental building block of whole-brain activity offers a common framework to relate findings across scales and species. We present examples of the diverse techniques commonly used to study brain states associated with physiology and higher-order cognitive processes, and discuss how integration across them will enable a more comprehensive and mechanistic characterization of the neural dynamics that are crucial to survival but are disrupted in disease.