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Time of day affects global brain fluctuations

Time of day affects global brain fluctuations

Time of day affects global brain fluctuations
Feb 18, 2020 1 min, 3 secs

Across the whole brain, time of day was also associated with marked decreases in resting-state functional connectivity -- the correlated activity between different brain regions when no explicit task is being performed.

"We were surprised by the size of the overall time-of-day effects, since the global fMRI signal is affected by many factors and there is substantial variation across individuals.

At the present moment we don't have a good explanation of the directionality of our findings.

However, the fact that we also observed slight time-of-day-associated variation in the breathing patterns of participants suggests that we may also need to consider clues outside of the brain to fully understand these effects," said Csaba Orban, first author of the study.

Based on the findings, the authors recommend that researchers explicitly report the time of day of fMRI scans and other experimental protocols and measurements, as this could help account for between-study variation in results and potentially even failure to replicate findings.

"We hope these findings will motivate fellow neuroscientists to give more consideration to potential effects of time of day on measures of brain activity, especially in other large-scale studies where subjects are often scanned throughout the day for logistical reasons," said Thomas Yeo, the study's senior author.

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Materials provided by PLOS.

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