The Turbulent Brain: a toolbox to compute the turbulent dynamical behaviour of whole-brain activity

Abstract

Brain disorders remain one of the greatest challenges in neuroscience. Computational precision medicine offers a promising framework to reveal the mechanistic principles governing both healthy and pathological brain dynamics. In this context, we present The Turbulent Brain (TTB) toolbox, an open-source MATLAB platform that implements and disseminates the turbulence framework for immediate and widespread application in neuroscience research. The toolbox combines model-free and model-based analyses through an intuitive graphical interface, enabling customizable workflows across different parcellations and preprocessing pipelines. Our toolbox builds on recent advances demonstrating that turbulence physics can effectively capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of brain activity as a high-dimensional system operating far from equilibrium. This framework allows researchers to explore how fundamental mechanisms are modulated across distinct brain states and neurological and psychiatric disorders, including disorders of consciousness and major depressive disorder. As an illustrative application case, we used TTB to analyse fMRI data from 176 individuals from the Human Connectome Project during resting state and movie watching, showing that movie watching, as compared to resting state, significantly reduces information transmission in terms of turbulence measures, with stronger reductions observed during Creative Commons movie watching compared to Hollywood movies. In summary, the TTB toolbox establishes an accessible framework providing a methodological bridge between nonlinear physics and computational neuroscience, offering new tools for investigating psychiatric conditions and altered states of consciousness.