A Resonance Model for Spontaneous Cortical Activity

How human brain function emerges from structure has intrigued researchers for decades and numerous models have been put forward, yet none of them yields a close structure-function relation. Here we present a resonance model based on neuronal spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) principle to describe the spontaneous cortical activity by incorporating the dynamic interactions between neuronal populations into a wave equation, which is able to accurately predict the resting brain functional connectivity (FC), including the resting-state networks. Besides, the proposed model provides strong theoretical and experimental evidences that the spontaneous dynamic coupling between brain regions fluctuates with a low frequency. Crucially, it is able to account for how the negative functional correlations emerge during resonance. We test the model with a large cohort of subjects (1038) from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) S1200 release in both time and frequency domain, which exhibits superior performance to existing eigen-decomposition models.