Fig. 2: Early spatial development of the synergistic scaffold at different frequency bands.

The ball size indicates participation frequency, of each cortical region (“node”) in the optimally synergistic ensembles (collectively forming the “synergistic scaffold”) in different age groups (rows), and at different frequency bands (columns). For each infant, maximally synergistic subsets of the whole brain were discovered using simulated annealing¹²², with the negative O-information as the objective function (for details see “Materials and methods”). Running the optimizer a large number of times reveals a landscape of non-identical, but overlapping, synergistic ensembles, which recruit brain regions from different areas at distinct periods of development, so we extracted the number of times each node was selected across all trials of all infants, and visualize¹²⁵ those that appear in  > 40% of optimal sets. Note the early prominence of frontal synergistic scaffold, the incremental recruitment of the occipital regions, and the late-appearing participation of the central regions. The colors indicate the anatomical affiliation in different cortical regions: frontal (orange), central (purple), temporal (green), and occipital (black).