Revealing the relevant spatiotemporal scale underlying whole-brain dynamics

The brain rapidly processes and adapts to new information by dynamically switching between activity in whole-brain functional networks. In this whole-brain modelling study we investigate the relevance of spatiotemporal scale in whole-brain functional networks. This is achieved through estimating brain parcellations at different spatial scales (100-900 regions) and time series at different temporal scales (from milliseconds to seconds) generated by a whole-brain model fitted to fMRI data. We quantify a fingerprint of healthy dynamics quantifying the richness of the dynamical repertoire at each spatiotemporal scale by computing the entropy of switching activity between whole-brain functional networks. The results show that the optimal relevant spatial scale is around 300 regions and a temporal scale of around 150 milliseconds. Overall, this study provides much needed evidence for the relevant spatiotemporal scales needed to make sense of neuroimaging data.