ATLANTA — Researchers at Georgia State University have identified a previously unknown aspect of schizophrenia that offers a new way to understand how the disorder affects large-scale brain coordination.
In a new study , published in the journal Translational Psychiatry , researchers introduced a new method for measuring how brain networks maintain balanced activity as well as how they recover when that balance is disrupted.
The approach revealed the brain’s ability to steer itself back toward balance after disturbances, and the findings suggest that people with schizophrenia experience more frequent imbalances in the strength of brain network activity with greater difficulty restoring that balance once it’s lost.
“Our findings reveal that schizophrenia is not simply a disorder in which the brain falls out of balance more often,” said Sir-Lord Wiafe , a Georgia State doctoral candidate in computer science and first author of the study.
“What excites me most is that we found something that was hiding in plain sight,” said Wiafe, who is also a researcher at the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science, or TReNDS Center . “Researchers have been studying whether brain regions work in time with each other, but it has been very difficult to get a clean read on whether they were working with the right strength because the brain’s own internal timing keeps getting in the way. Once we got past that, a new picture appeared.”
For decades, schizophrenia research has largely focused on whether activity rises and falls in different parts of the brain in tandem. The Georgia State-led team asked a different question: Are different brain networks engaging at proportionate strengths relative to one another?
Because different brain systems naturally function on different timescales, differences in timing can obscure differences in signal strength. The researchers developed a framework that aligns those timescales first, allowing them to isolate how strongly networks engage relative to one another.
These timescales range from rapid, split-second activity to slower changes over several seconds. Accounting for them is what allowed the researchers to compare signal strength cleanly across brain regions. The team analyzed resting-state brain scans from 160 healthy adults and 151 people with schizophrenia and evaluated the method’s test-retest reliability in 827 participants.
The research team used scans from the Human Connectome Project, a National Institutes of Health-funded initiative mapping the human brain to advance our understanding of behavior and neurological disorders.
People with schizophrenia showed greater imbalance in signal strength, also called amplitude, re-entered these unbalanced states more frequently, and recovered more slowly toward balance.
One might expect that a brain falling out of balance more often and recovering more slowly would simply be a more chaotic, more random system overall. Surprisingly, the researchers found that this slower recovery was not caused by greater randomness or chaos in the brain.
The team directly measured the level of randomness in brain activity and found no meaningful difference between people with schizophrenia and healthy participants. Instead, the difference appears to lie in the brain’s ability to steer itself back toward balanced signal strength after a disruption. In other words, the schizophrenia brain is not only losing that balance more often but also having a harder time finding its way back.
Wiafe conducted the research under the mentorship of Vince D. Calhoun , a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, the founding director of the TReNDS Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Brain Health and Image Analysis.
Based at Georgia State’s downtown Atlanta Campus, the TReNDS Center is a research partnership among Georgia State University, Georgia Tech and Emory University.
“The exciting part of this work is that it moves us beyond a snapshot of which brain networks are out of balance. We can now measure how the brain responds when that balance is disrupted and how effectively it returns to a stable state,” Calhoun said. “That recovery process appears to be altered in schizophrenia and is related to both symptoms and cognitive performance.”
The researchers also observed that different patterns of imbalance corresponded to different aspects of illness. Abnormal activity involving the cerebellum was associated with hallucinations and delusions while imbalances involving cognitive control and default mode networks were linked to symptoms like reduced motivation and emotional expression. Slower recovery was also associated with poorer reasoning and problem-solving ability.
Beyond offering new insights into schizophrenia, the researchers say the framework could provide a new way to study brain coordination across other psychiatric and neurological disorders. The measurements gathered with this research could help scientists better understand who might benefit from certain brain stimulation treatments, though more study is needed before it can be used to guide patient care.
Coauthors on the study, in addition to Calhoun, are Spencer Kinsey, Najme Soleimani, Raymond O. Nsafoa, Nigar Khasayeva, Amritha Harikumar and Robyn Miller.
Translational Psychiatry
Observational study
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Aberrant recovery of timescale-aligned amplitude balance links to symptoms and cognition in schizophrenia
10-Jul-2026