Intrinsic Neural Timescales Relate to Event-Related Activity—Key Role for Intracolumnar Connections

The relationship of the brain's intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) during the resting state with event-related activity in response to external stimuli remains poorly understood. Here, we bridge this gap by combining computational modeling with human magnetoencephalography (MEG, resting state: <i>N</i> = 64, 45 female; task state: <i>N</i> = 58, 41 female) data to investigate the relation of INTs with task-related activity, e.g., event-related fields (ERFs). Using the Jansen-Rit model, we first show that intracolumnar (and thus intraregional) excitatory and inhibitory connections (rather than interregional feedback, feedforward, and lateral connections between the columns of different regions) strongly influence both resting-state INTs and task-related ERFs. Secondly, our results demonstrate a positive relationship between the magnitude of event-related fields (mERFs) and INTs, observed in both model simulations and empirical MEG data collected during an emotional face recognition task. Thirdly, modeling shows that the positive relationship of mERF and INT depends on intracolumnar connections through observing that the correlation between them disappears for fixed values of intracolumnar connections. Together, these findings highlight the importance of intracolumnar connections as a shared biological mechanism underlying both the resting state's INTs and the task state's event-related activity including their interplay.