Cortical traveling waves reflect state-dependent hierarchical sequencing of local regions in the human connectome network

Abstract Recent human studies using electrocorticography have demonstrated that alpha and theta band oscillations form traveling waves on the cortical surface. According to neural synchronization theories, the cortical traveling waves may group local cortical regions and sequence them by phase synchronization; however these contributions have not yet been assessed. This study aimed to evaluate the functional contributions of traveling waves using connectome-based network modeling. In the simulation, we observed stable traveling waves on the entire cortical surface wherein the topographical pattern of these phases was substantially correlated with the empirically obtained resting-state networks, and local radial waves also appeared within the size of the empirical networks (