Danielle S Bassett

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of Physics

Decisions in humans and other organisms depend, in part, on learning and using models that capture the statistical structure of the world, including the long-run expected outcomes of our actions. One prominent approach to forecasting such long-run outcomes is the successor representation (SR), which predicts future states aggregated over multiple t...

The stability of complex networks, from power grids to biological systems, is crucial for their proper functioning. It is thus important to control such systems to maintain or restore their stability. Traditional approaches rely on real-time state measurements for feedback control, but this can be challenging in many real-world systems, such as the...

Functional neuroimaging is an essential tool for neuroscience research. Pre-processing pipelines produce standardized, minimally pre-processed data to support a range of potential analyses. However, post-processing is not similarly standardized. While several options for post-processing exist, they may not support output from different pre-processi...

In interacting dynamical systems, specific local interaction rules for system components give rise to diverse and complex global dynamics. Long dynamical cycles are a key feature of many natural interacting systems, especially in biology. Examples of dynamical cycles range from circadian rhythms regulating sleep to cell cycles regulating reproducti...

Large-scale interactions among multiple brain regions manifest as bursts of activations called neuronal avalanches, which reconfigure according to the task at hand and, hence, might constitute natural candidates to design brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). To test this hypothesis, we used source-reconstructed magneto/electroencephalography during re...

Functional neuroimaging is an essential tool for neuroscience research. Pre-processing pipelines produce standardized, minimally pre-processed data to support a range of potential analyses. However, post-processing is not similarly standardized. While several options for post-processing exist, they tend not to support output from disparate pre-proc...

Cluster synchronization is of paramount importance for the normal functioning of numerous technological and natural systems. Deviations from normal cluster synchronization patterns are closely associated with various malfunctions, such as neurological disorders in the brain. Therefore, it is crucial to restore normal system functions by stabilizing...

It is critical to support healthy development of alcohol-related habits, particularly in contexts with heightened risk such as college campuses. Mindfulness-based strategies are frequently used in interventions to reduce substance use in clinical populations, but their utility as a preventative strategy among emerging adults is less clear. Combinin...

Delay discounting is a measure of impulsive choice relevant in adolescence as it predicts many real-life outcomes, including obesity and academic achievement. However, resting-state functional networks underlying individual differences in delay discounting during youth remain incompletely described. Here we investigate the association between multi...

Neuronal activity propagates through the network during seizures, engaging brain dynamics at multiple scales. Such propagating events can be described through the avalanches framework, which can relate spatiotemporal activity at the microscale with global network properties. Interestingly, propagating avalanches in healthy networks are indicative o...

Delay discounting is a measure of impulsive choice relevant in adolescence as it predicts many real-life outcomes, including substance use disorders, obesity, and academic achievement. However, the functional networks underlying individual differences in delay discounting during youth remain incompletely described. Here we investigate the associati...

Cluster synchronization is of great importance for the normal functioning of numerous technological and natural systems. Deviations from normal cluster synchronization patterns are closely associated with various malfunctions, such as neurological disorders in the brain. Therefore, it is crucial to restore normal system functions by stabilizing the...

Spontaneous neural activity has become increasingly linked to behavioral and cognitive output. A specific cognitive control mode, proactive control, uses prior information to plan and prepare the brain to be particularly sensitive to incoming goal-directed stimuli. Little is known about specific proactive mechanisms implemented via preparatory patt...

A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is to uncover the principles governing how the brain interacts with the external environment. However, assumptions about external stimuli fundamentally constrain current computational models. We show in silico that unknown external stimulation can produce error in the estimated linear time-invariant dynamical...

Humans are a fundamentally social species whose well-being depends on how we connect with and relate to one another. As such, scientific understanding of factors that promote health and well-being requires insight into causal factors present at multiple levels of analysis, ranging from brain networks that dynamically reconfigure across situations t...

Prior work has shown that there is substantial interindividual variation in the spatial distribution of functional networks across the cerebral cortex, or functional topography. However, it remains unknown whether there are sex differences in the topography of individualized networks in youth. Here, we leveraged an advanced machine learning method...

Resting-state blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal acquired through functional magnetic resonance imaging is a proxy of neural activity and a key mechanism for assessing neurological conditions. Therefore, practical tools to filter out artefacts that can compromise the assessment are required. On the one hand, a variety of tailored methods to...

Correcting head motion artifacts in diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) scans is particularly challenging due to the dramatic changes in image contrast at different gradient strengths and directions. Head motion correction is typically performed using a Gaussian Process model implemented in FSL’s Eddy. Recently, the 3dSHORE-based SHORELine method was int...

Objective Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most common drug-resistant epilepsy in adults. Here, we aimed to profile local neural function in TLE in vivo , building on prior evidence that has identified widespread structural alterations. Using multimodal MRI, we mapped intrinsic neural timescales (INT) at rest, examined associations to TLE-relate...

The reconfiguration of large-scale interactions among multiple brain regions underpins complex behavior. It manifests in bursts of activations, called neuronal avalanches, which can be tracked non-invasively as they expand across the brain. Responding to a new task requires brain regions to appropriately reconfigure their interactions, which might...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007360.].

Mapping individual differences in behavior is fundamental to personalized neuroscience, but quantifying complex behavior in real world settings remains a challenge. While mobility patterns captured by smartphones have increasingly been linked to a range of psychiatric symptoms, existing research has not specifically examined whether individuals hav...

Modifying behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, is difficult. Creating psychological distance between unhealthy triggers and one’s present experience can make it easier to change. Using two multisite, randomized experiments, we examine whether theory-driven strategies to create psychological distance—mindfulness and perspective-taking—can change...

A key challenge for understanding human experience is to capture the interplay between biology, environment, and culture. Because these levels of analysis operate across temporal scales from milliseconds to years, multimodal techniques are needed to provide insight into their operation and interaction. Data from brain scanning (e.g., neuroimaging)...

The brain is organized into networks at multiple resolutions, or scales, yet studies of functional network development typically focus on a single scale. Here, we derive personalized functional networks across 29 scales in a large sample of youths (n = 693, ages 8–23 years) to identify multi-scale patterns of network re-organization related to neur...

Family conflict is a well-established predictor of well-being in youth. Traditional approaches focus on between-family differences in conflict. Daily fluctuations in conflict within families might also impact wellbeing, but more research is needed to understand how and why. Using 21 days of daily diary data and 6-times a day experience-sampling dat...

Physical activity, sleep, affect, and purpose in life are part of a system that reflects wellbeing in daily life. A holistic understanding of the naturalistic dynamics of the interactions within this system is key to promoting wellbeing. Using self-reported affect (happy, sad, angry, anxious) and physical activity periods collected twice per day vi...

Cluster synchronization underlies various functions in the brain. Abnormal patterns of cluster synchronization are often associated with neurological disorders. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neurosurgical technique used to treat several brain diseases, which has been observed to regulate neuronal synchrony patterns. Despite its widespread use,...

Cluster synchronization underlies various functions in the brain. Abnormal patterns of cluster synchronization are often associated with neurological disorders. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neurosurgical technique used to treat several brain diseases, which has been observed to regulate neuronal synchrony patterns. Despite its widespread use,...

There are pronounced individual differences in the extent to which affective responses are associated with daily stressor exposure. These individual differences have implications for health and well-being. We use 21 days of daily diary data in 167 participants (mean age = 25.37, SD = 7.34; 81.44% women) and test (1) the moderating effect of flouris...

Network neuroscience provides a systems approach to the study of the brain and enables the examination of interactions measured at different temporal and spatial scales. We review current methods to quantify the structure of brain networks and compare that structure across different clinical cohorts, cognitive states, and subjects. We further intro...

Precisely how the anatomical structure of the brain supports a wide range of complex functions remains a question of marked importance in both basic and clinical neuroscience. Progress has been hampered by the lack of theoretical frameworks explaining how a structural network of relatively rigid inter-areal connections can produce a diverse reperto...

Children's behavior changes from day to day, but the factors that contribute to its variability are understudied. We developed a novel repeated measures paradigm to study children's persistence by capitalizing on a task that children complete every day: toothbrushing (N = 81; 48% female; 36-47 months; 80% white, 14% Multiracial, 10% Hispanic, 2% As...

Mindfulness is characterized by attentiveness to the present experience with nonjudgmental awareness and acceptance. Practicing mindfulness alters brain function to support the executive regulation of thoughts, feelings, and behavior. While early stages of practice are thought to require greater "neural effort" for later efficiency, current evidenc...

Aphasia recovery after stroke depends on the condition of the remaining, extralesional brain network. Network control theory (NCT) provides a unique, quantitative approach to assess the interaction between brain networks. In this longitudinal, large-scale, whole-brain connectome study, we evaluated whether controllability measures of language-relat...

Adult cortex is organized into distributed functional communities. Yet, little is known about community architecture of children’s brains. Here, we uncovered the community structure of cortex in childhood using fMRI data from 670 children aged 9-11 years (48% female, replication sample n=544, 56% female) from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Deve...

Purpose To examine the dynamic expression of sensation-seeking and urgency in daily life and the implications for alcohol use and risk-taking during young adulthood. Methods Daily diary surveys were administered to young adults (n = 77) aged 18-25 years every evening for 21 days to assess day’s sensation-seeking, urgency, risk-taking, and alcohol...

Neuroplasticity, defined as the brain's ability to change in response to its environment, has been extensively studied at the cellular and molecular levels. Work in animal models suggests that stimulation to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) enhances plasticity, and that myelination constrains plasticity. Little is known, however, about whether prox...

Background The waxing and waning of negative affect in daily life is normative, reflecting an adaptive capacity to respond flexibly to changing circumstances. However, understanding of the brain structure correlates of affective variability in naturalistic settings has been limited. Using network control theory, we examine facets of brain structure...

Excitation-inhibition (EI) balance may be required for the organisation of brain dynamics to a phase transition, criticality, which confers computational benefits. Brain pathology associated with EI imbalance may therefore occur due to a deviation from criticality. However, evidence linking critical dynamics with EI imbalance-induced pathology is l...

Epilepsy is one of the most common chronic neurological conditions, traditionally defined as a disorder of recurrent seizures. Cognitive and affective dysfunctions are increasingly recognized as core disease dimensions and can affect patient wellbeing sometimes more than the seizures themselves. Connectome- based approaches hold immense promise for...

There is growing interest in how neuromodulators shape brain networks. Recent neuroimaging studies provide evidence that brainstem arousal systems, such as the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system (LC-NE), influence functional connectivity and brain network topology, suggesting they have a role in flexibly reconfiguring brain networks in order to...

Objective: Alcohol is theorized to be motivated by desires to regulate negative affect and/or to enhance positive affect. We tested the association between momentary affect and alcohol use in the daily lives of college students, hypothesizing that alcohol use would be more likely to follow increases in positive affect and that alcohol use would not...

Seizures are a prominent feature in N-Methyl-D-Aspartate receptor antibody (NMDAR antibody) encephalitis, a distinct neuro-immunological disorder in which specific human autoantibodies bind and crosslink the surface of NMDAR proteins thereby causing internalization and a state of NMDAR hypofunction. To further understand ictogenesis in this disorde...

A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is to uncover the principles governing how the brain interacts with the external environment. However, assumptions about external stimuli fundamentally constrain current computational models. We show in silico that unknown external stimulation can produce error in the estimated linear time-invariant dynamical...

Significance Real-world networks are complex, comprising vast webs of interconnected elements performing a diverse array of social and biological functions. Common among many networks, however, is the pressure to be efficiently compressed—either in the brain or in the genetic code. But just as files on a computer can be compressed to differing degr...

Network control theory provides a framework by which neurophysiological dynamics of the brain can be modelled as a function of the structural connectome constructed from diffusion MRI. Average controllability describes the ability of a region to drive the brain to easy-to-reach neurophysiological states whilst modal controllability describes the ab...

Functional connectivity (FC) can be represented as a network, and is frequently used to better understand the neural underpinnings of complex tasks such as motor imagery (MI) detection in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, errors in the estimation of connectivity can affect the detection performances. In this work, we address the problem of...

A fundamental understanding of synchronized behavior in multiagent systems can be acquired by studying analytically tractable Kuramoto models. However, such models typically diverge from many real systems whose dynamics evolve under nonnegligible resource constraints. Here we construct a system of coupled Kuramoto oscillators that consume or produc...

Brain network models derived from graph theory have the potential to guide functional neurosurgery, and to improve rates of post-operative seizure freedom for patients with epilepsy. A barrier to applying these models clinically is that intracranial EEG electrode implantation strategies vary by center, region and country, from cortical grid & strip...

The brain is organized into networks at multiple resolutions, or scales, yet studies of functional network development typically focus on a single scale. Here, we derived personalized functional networks across 29 scales in a large sample of youths (n=693, ages 8-23 years) to identify multi-scale patterns of network re-organization related to neuro...

Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is the primary method for noninvasively studying the organization of white matter in the human brain. Here we introduce QSIPrep, an integrative software platform for the processing of diffusion images that is compatible with nearly all dMRI sampling schemes. Drawing on a diverse set of software s...

We used a virtual lesion DTI fiber tracking approach with healthy subject DTI data and simulated periventricular white matter (PVWM) lesion masks to predict the sequence of connectivity changes associated with progressive PVWM ischemia. We found that the optic radiations, inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, inferior longitudinal fasciculus, corpu...

The human brain undergoes a prolonged period of cortical development that spans multiple decades. During childhood and adolescence, cortical development progresses from lower-order, primary and unimodal cortices with sensory and motor functions to higher-order, transmodal association cortices subserving executive, socioemotional, and mentalizing fu...

Functional connectivity (FC) networks are typically inferred from resting-state fMRI data using the Pearson correlation between BOLD time series from pairs of brain regions. However, alternative methods of estimating functional connectivity have not been systematically tested for their sensitivity or robustness to head motion artifact. Here, we eva...

Recent advances in neuroscience have enabled the exploration of brain structure at the level of individual synaptic connections. These connectomics datasets continue to grow in size and complexity; methods to search for and identify interesting graph patterns offer a promising approach to quickly reduce data dimensionality and enable discovery. The...

Cross-frequency phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) describes the phenomenon where the power of a high-frequency oscillation evolves with the phase of a low-frequency one. It has been widely observed in the brain and linked to various brain functions. In this paper, we show that Stuart-Landau oscillators coupled in a nonlinear fashion can give rise to P...

Brain maps, or atlases, are essential tools for studying brain function and organization. The abundance of available atlases used across the neuroscience literature, however, creates an implicit challenge that may alter the hypotheses and predictions we make about neurological function and pathophysiology. Here, we demonstrate how parcellation scal...

In the last decade, functional connectivity (FC) has been increasingly adopted based on its ability to capture statistical dependencies between multivariate brain signals. However, the role of FC in the context of brain-computer interface applications is still poorly understood. To address this gap in knowledge, we considered a group of 20 healthy...

Dynamical brain state transitions are critical for flexible working memory but the network mechanisms are incompletely understood. Here, we show that working memory performance entails brain-wide switching between activity states using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy controls and individuals with schizophrenia, pha...

The waxing and waning of negative affect in daily life is normative, reflecting an adaptive capacity to respond flexibly to changing circumstances. Here, we provide insight into facets of brain structure that may enable negative affect variability in daily life. We use diffusion spectrum imaging data from 95 young adults (Mage = 20.19 years, SDage...

Neuropathological staging studies have suggested that tau pathology spreads through the brain in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other tauopathies, but it is unclear how neuroanatomical connections, spatial proximity, and regional vulnerability contribute. In this study, we seed tau pathology in the brains of nontransgenic mice with AD tau and quantif...

Prior work has shown that there is substantial interindividual variation in the spatial distribution of functional networks across the cerebral cortex, or functional topography . However, it remains unknown whether there are sex differences in the topography of individualized networks in youth. Here we leveraged an advanced machine learning method...

Remote synchronization describes a fascinating phenomenon where oscillators that are not directly connected via physical links evolve synchronously. This phenomenon is thought to be critical for distributed information processing in the mammalian brain, where long-range synchronization is empirically observed between neural populations belonging to...

Mapping individual differences in behavior is fundamental to personalized neuroscience. Here, we establish that statistical patterns of smartphone-based mobility features represent unique footprints that allow individual identification. Critically, mobility footprints exhibit varying levels of person-specific distinctiveness and are associated with...

All epilepsies are defined by a propensity for recurrent seizures, characterized by hypersynchronous electrographic activity. Understanding this overarching property would be advanced by a thorough quantification of how the global synchrony of the epileptic brain responds to small perturbations that do not trigger seizures. Here, we leverage analys...