The time scales of irreversibility in spontaneous brain activity are altered in obsessive compulsive disorder

Davide Bernardi; David Shannahoff-Khalsa; Jeff Sale; Jon A Wright; Luciano Fadiga; David Papo

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1158404

The time scales of irreversibility in spontaneous brain activity are altered in obsessive compulsive disorder

Front Psychiatry. 2023 May 10:14:1158404. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1158404. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Davide Bernardi¹, David Shannahoff-Khalsa^{2

3

4}, Jeff Sale⁵, Jon A Wright², Luciano Fadiga^{1

6}, David Papo^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Translational Neurophysiology of Speech and Communication, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Ferrara, Italy.
² BioCircuits Institute, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States.
³ Center for Integrative Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States.
⁴ The Khalsa Foundation for Medical Science, Del Mar, CA, United States.
⁵ San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States.
⁶ Department of Neuroscience and Rehabilitation, Section of Physiology, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy.

Abstract

We study how obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) affects the complexity and time-reversal symmetry-breaking (irreversibility) of the brain resting-state activity as measured by magnetoencephalography (MEG). Comparing MEG recordings from OCD patients and age/sex matched control subjects, we find that irreversibility is more concentrated at faster time scales and more uniformly distributed across different channels of the same hemisphere in OCD patients than in control subjects. Furthermore, the interhemispheric asymmetry between homologous areas of OCD patients and controls is also markedly different. Some of these differences were reduced by 1-year of Kundalini Yoga meditation treatment. Taken together, these results suggest that OCD alters the dynamic attractor of the brain's resting state and hint at a possible novel neurophysiological characterization of this psychiatric disorder and how this therapy can possibly modulate brain function.

Keywords: Kundalini Yoga; dynamical disease; meditation; obsessive-compulsive disorder; permutation entropy; spontaneous brain activity; time scales; time-reversal symmetry.

Grants and funding

LF acknowledges funding from Ministero della Ricerca (20208RB4N9) PRIN 2020 and the European Union H2020 - EnTimeMent (FETPROACT- 824160). The preparation of the data via the work of DS-K, JS, and JW used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by the National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562.