Fig. 1

Illustration of the whole-brain dynamics. Neural activity is modeled through a cellular automaton with three states, namely, inactive (I), active (A) and refractory (R). Time evolves in discrete steps from left to right. The temporal evolution of the 7-th inactive node (salmon) is as follows: in \(t_1\), it is surrounded by two active nodes (green) and two inactive nodes (salmon); in \(t_2\), the incoming excitation from nodes 5 and 6 is propagated (i.e, \({\tilde{W}}_{76}s_6+{\tilde{W}}_{75}s_5>T\)); and finally, in \(t_3\), it reaches the refractory state (blue). At each time step, one may compute several quantities, in particular, the clusters activity, which are defined as ensembles of nodes that are structurally connected to each other and simultaneously active. For example, in the first time step, the brain state is composed by two clusters; the first cluster (\(S_1=2\)) formed by nodes 5 and 8 and the second cluster (\(S_2=1\)) formed by node 6). The brain network represented in this figure is for illustration purposes and does not correspond to the empirical networks used in simulations.