Why Some Brains Switch Gears More Efficiently Than Others

Rutgers Health researchers reveal how neural pathways integrate fast and slow information processing

The human brain is constantly processing information that unfolds at different speeds - from split-second reactions to sudden environmental changes to slower, more reflective processes such as understanding context or meaning.

A new studyfrom Rutgers Health, published in Nature Communications, sheds light on how the brain integrates these fast and slow signals across its complex web of white matter connectivity pathways to support cognition and behavior.

Different regions of the brain are specialized for processing information over specific time windows, a property known as intrinsic neural timescales, or INTs for short.

"To affect our environment through action, our brains must combine information processed over different timescales," said Linden Parkes, assistant professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the senior author of the study. "The brain achieves this by leveraging its white matter connectivity to share information across regions, and this integration is crucial for human behavior."

We found that differences in how the brain processes information at different speeds help explain why people vary in their cognitive abilities.

Linden Parkes

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

To investigate how this integration works, Parkes and his team analyzed multimodal brain imaging data from 960 individuals. They built detailed maps of each person's brain connectivity, known as connectomes, and applied mathematical models that describe how complex systems change over time to understand how information flows through these networks.

"Our work probes the mechanisms underlying this process in humans by directly modeling regions' INTs from their connectivity," said Parkes, a core member of the Rutgers Brain Health Instituteand the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research. "This draws a direct link between how brain regions process information locally and how that processing is shared across the brain to produce behavior."

Rutgers researchers found that the distribution of neural timescales across the cortex plays a crucial role in how efficiently the brain switches between large-scale activity patterns related to behavior. Importantly, this organization varies across individuals.

"We found that differences in how the brain processes information at different speeds help explain why people vary in their cognitive abilities," Parkes said.

The researchers also discovered that these patterns are linked to genetic, molecular and cellular features of brain regions, grounding the findings in fundamental neurobiology. Similar relationships were observed in the mouse brain, suggesting that the mechanisms are conserved across species.

"Our work highlights a fundamental link between the brain's white-matter connectivity and its local computational properties," Parkes said. "People whose brain wiring is better matched to the way different regions handle fast and slow information tend to show higher cognitive capacity."

Building on these findings, the team is now extending the work to study neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, examining how disruptions in brain connectivity may alter information processing.

The study was conducted in collaboration with Avram Holmes, an associate professor of psychiatry and a core member of the Rutgers Brain Health Institute and the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research, along with postdoctoral researchers Ahmad Beyh and Amber Howell, as well as Jason Z. Kim from Cornell University.

Explore more of the ways Rutgers research is shaping the future.