The human brain is constantly managing streams of information that move at very different speeds. Some signals require immediate responses to sudden changes in the environment, while others involve slower forms of thinking, such as interpreting meaning, context, or complex situations.

A new study from Rutgers Health, published in Nature Communications, examined how the brain combines these fast and slow forms of processing through its network of white matter connections. Researchers say this coordination is essential for cognition, behavior, and the ability to respond effectively to the world around us.

Different parts of the brain are tuned to process information over specific time ranges. Scientists refer to these patterns as intrinsic neural timescales, or INTs.

“To affect our environment through action, our brains must combine information processed over different timescales,” said Linden Parkes, assistant professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers Health and the senior author of the study. “The brain achieves this by leveraging its white matter connectivity to share information across regions, and this integration is crucial for human behavior.”

Mapping the Brain’s Communication Networks
To explore how this system works, Parkes and his colleagues analyzed multimodal brain imaging data from 960 people. The team created detailed maps of each participant’s brain connections, known as connectomes, and used mathematical models designed to track how complex systems evolve over time. This allowed the researchers to study how information travels through the brain’s communication pathways.

“Our work probes the mechanisms underlying this process in humans by directly modeling regions’ INTs from their connectivity,” said Parkes, a core member of the Rutgers Brain Health Institute and the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research. “This draws a direct link between how brain regions process information locally and how that processing is shared across the brain to produce behavior.”