Spontaneously emerging coherent fluctuations have been long observed in electrophysiological and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. These dynamics have been identified in multiple brain areas in the 1–100 and <0.1 Hz frequency ranges spanning neurophysiological oscillations and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals, respectively. In this article, we demonstrate that transient neural synchronization between two sites may lead to the emergence of ultra-slow frequency fluctuations in the BOLD signal at another (third) site. Starting with a network model comprised of three neural oscillators, we illustrate the critical role of time delay and coupling strength in generating these slow coherent fluctuations as a function of intermittently occurring neural coherence. When extending the network toward biologically realistic primate connectivity, we find that the BOLD activation patterns arise from neurophysiological coherence, especially among medial cortical areas. This finding demonstrates a network-level mechanism whereby the BOLD activity at a given region is critically influenced by the neuroelectric synchronization patterns of other regions in the network.
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