Functional criticality in the human brain: Physiological, behavioral and neurodevelopmental correlates

Understanding the critical features of the human brain at multiple time scales is vital for both normal development and disease research. A recently proposed method, the vertex-wise Index of Functional Criticality (vIFC) based on fMRI, has been testified as a sensitive neuroimaging marker to characterize critical transitions of human brain dynamics during Alzheimer’s disease progression. However, it remains unclear whether vIFC in healthy brains is associated with neuropsychological and neurophysiological measurements. Using the Nathan Kline Institute/Rockland lifespan cross-sectional datasets and openfMRI single participant longitudinal datasets, we found consistent spatial patterns of vIFC across the entire cortical mantle: the inferior parietal and the precuneus exhibited high vIFC. On a time scale of years, we observed that vIFC increased with age in the left ventral posterior cingulate gyrus. On a time scale of days and weeks, vIFC demonstrated the capacity to identify a link between anxiety and pulse. These results showed that vIFC can serve as a useful neuroimaging marker for detecting physiological, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental transitions. Based on the criticality theory in nonlinear dynamics, the current vIFC study sheds new light on human brain studies from a nonlinear perspective and opens potential new avenues for normal and abnormal human brain studies.