Hello good people of mastodon. I've been studying human brain development since starting my postdoc and have some results to share about how alpha rhythms and intrinsic neural timescales develop. (https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.21.671637)
Why alpha? Well, there was already plenty of evidence that alpha rhythms speed up with age, making it one of the better studied physiological markers of neurodevelopment.
Why intrinsic neural timescales? There have been hints that intrinsic neural timescales decrease with age, and they are also a functional measure of neural processing hierarchy - sensorimotor regions (at the base of the hierarchy) tend to have shorter intrinsic timescales than association regions (in developed brains, anyway).
The hierarchy bit caught my attention because emerging evidence suggests sensorimotor regions develop before association regions.
So, we asked whether developmental changes to these measures were related, and also tested whether their relationships depended on which pole of the neural hierarchy we sampled from, using intracranial electrocorticography from kids, teens, and adults.
We found that age-dependent alpha frequency increases were indeed related to timescale decreases, but the relationship was really only evident in association regions. I thought this was very cool!
What I like about this study is that ECoG gives us really precise anatomical localization of our signals AND high temporal resolution, which allowed us to bring together findings from fMRI (slow) and scalp-EEG (difficult to localize), and fill in a couple gaps.
I'm hoping the paper does a good job of contextualizing our results within those literatures, but it's my first go in this field so feedback is welcome!
Also, message me if you'd like to see these results in poster form and I'll send you a PDF ✨
#neuroscience #neurodevelopment #electrophysiology
Daniel Prieto
jobRxiv
Psychotherapy Commission ACPE
Scientific Frontline
Robert Wolff
ScienceOpen
Jesse Miles