Jakub Vohryzek, Joana Cabral, Peter Vuust, Gustavo Deco, Morten L. Kringelbach (2022), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 380 (2022), art. 20210247; theme issue “Emergent phenomena in complex physical and socio-technical systems: from cells to societies” — DOI-10.1098/rsta.2021.0247
Key takeaways
- The authors argue that healthy waking brain states sit in a metastable regime between order and disorder. On this view, depression is an overly rigid landscape with dominant attractors and psychedelics flatten the landscape. Whole-brain models, meaning connectome-coupled nonlinear oscillators near a Hopf bifurcation, are the mechanistic tool for explaining these spatiotemporal signatures and for finding perturbations that move between states.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-054. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Adaptive behaviour depends on whole-brain activity patterns that balance stability (order) with enough instability for flexibility, and this balance over space and time defines distinct brain states. Depression shows overly rigid, ordered dynamics, while psychedelics produce more disordered and sometimes over-flexible states. The review surveys neuroimaging and whole-brain modelling work that uses dynamical-systems principles to characterize these states. It suggests that the resulting spatiotemporal descriptions may eventually inform treatments that rebalance brain states in disease.
Standing in the record
Filed from the survey of 2026-09-25 of work the anthology set aside as out of scope (tier C): 315 seconds of active reading over 1 session in the papers-feed tracker. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-054 is the close reading of 2026-09-25, and it placed the work: Active — a short, readable map of the Deco/Kringelbach whole-brain-modelling programme and its psychedelic/depression framing, worth reading as an entry point. It is a perspective, not evidence: the landscape picture is a hypothesis resting on small primary studies that it neither sizes nor weighs.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-054, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — A review that the skim captures. Moderate owner time (t=315 s, one session). No ML content.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-054 is that reading):
- A compact review of the Deco/Kringelbach whole-brain modelling programme. Relevant to neuroscience and complex-systems notes on criticality and metastability.
- The evidence it reviews is largely small-sample neuroimaging. A deeper reading should look at the primary studies behind the depression and psychedelic claims before treating the landscape picture as established.
Access when seeded: The royalsocietypublishing.org page returned 403. I read the full open-access text (CC BY) on PubMed Central (PMC9125224): §1–7 including figure captions. Crossref gives online 2022-05-23 and issue 2022-07-11.