What if the brain could be understood like music—each moment of thought, perception, or awareness composed from harmonically organised patterns? That question sparked the development of connectome harmonics, a framework I introduced with Isaac Donnelly and Joel Pearson in Nature Communications (2016), and later explored in more depth with Morten Kringelbach and Gustavo Deco in The Neuroscientist (2017).

If connectome harmonics reveal the brain’s structural foundations—the natural wave patterns that can emerge from its physical wiring—then functional harmonics illuminate the brain’s actual conversation in motion.

What happens in the brain when consciousness is radically altered—when the boundaries of the self dissolve, time expands, and the world is perceived with heightened intensity? Using the framework of connectome harmonic decomposition, we explored this question by analyzing brain activity during psychedelic experiences.

What distinguishes a brain that is conscious from one that is not? And how can we understand the subtle boundary between minimal awareness and its apparent absence? Using the connectome harmonic framework, we investigated these questions in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), such as the vegetative state and minimally conscious state, in collaboration with Andrea Luppi, Emmanuel Stamatakis, Jakub Vohryzek, Morten Kringelbach, and many others (Luppi et al., 2023, Communications Biology).

Meditation is often associated with stillness, presence, and inner peace—but what does that look like in the brain? Using the harmonic language of brain activity, our recent work has begun to uncover how meditative practice, particularly vipassana meditation, reshapes the brain’s dynamical landscape across both momentary states and long-term traits.

What if the deepest symbolic patterns of the mind—mythic imagery, universal motifs, and archetypal stories—could be understood not just metaphorically, but mathematically? In our recent paper Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious, we explored this question by weaving together Jungian depth psychology, modern neuroscience, and the mathematical framework of connectome harmonics.

What if complex data—whether from a camera inside the human body or a scanner observing the human brain—could be translated into an elegant, low-dimensional map that reveals its underlying structure?