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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2024 Jul 18.
Published in final edited form as: Cell Rep. 2024 Jun 13;43(6):114359. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.114359

Figure 1. The cholinergic system deepens attractor landscapes.

Figure 1.

(A) Graphical representation of the effects of acetylcholine (ACh) on facilitating attractor landscape topography, in which brain states are particular locations in a low-dimensional state space. Neuromodulatory neurotransmitters are proposed to alter the topography of the landscape;11,12 specifically, ACh has been linked to the deepening of attractors.13

(B) Sagittal graphical representation of a macaque brain with nbM subnuclei projection patterns (Ch4AM and Ch4AL) with inhibition injection from muscimol.

(C) Time series extracted from symmetric ROIs following inactivation of the left nbM (recreated from original Turchi et al. data).

(D) Graphical representation of the influence of the cholinergic system on MSD and “activation energy” required to move; given that ACh acts to deepen the wells of the attractors and stabilize brain states, we predict that inhibition of the nbM will lead to a relative flattening of the energy landscape estimated from fMRI data.