Capturing time-varying brain dynamics

Abstract

The human brain is a complex network of interacting nonstationary subsystems, whose complicated spatial–temporal dynamics is still poorly understood. Deeper insights can be gained from recent improvements of time-series-analysis techniques to assess strength and direction of interactions together with methodologies for deriving and characterizing evolving networks from empirical time series. We here review these developments, and by taking the example of evolving epileptic brain networks, we discuss the progress that has been made in capturing and understanding brain dynamics that varies on time scales ranging from seconds to years.