Dr. Ryan Raut (October 7, 2026)

Presenter: Ryan Raut Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis https://ryraut.github.io/ Title: Brain-wide traveling waves as expressions of organismal dynamics Abstract: This talk will focus on an emerging connection between two prominent themes in systems neuroscience over the past decade, namely, brain state/arousal dynamics and spontaneous infra-slow brain activity. The former has gained attention amidst the increasingly widespread measurement of neural activity and behavior in awake animals; the latter is perhaps best known through its topographically organized correlation structure, which forms the basis of “resting-state functional connectivity” and is used to delineate large-scale brain networks. I will present converging evidence across several modalities and species demonstrating that (1) spontaneous infra-slow brain activity is organized into brain-wide, topographically structured traveling waves, and (2) these waves evolve in tight synchrony with ongoing fluctuations in physiological indices of arousal. I will then show how these observations can be unified by conceptualizing and formally modeling both phenomena as expressions of a latent, low- dimensional, organism-wide dynamical system. This work motivates a more physiologically integrative perspective on the mechanisms underlying traveling waves in the brain, at least in the infra-slow regime.