National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16(113), p. 4518-4523, 2016
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Significance Changes in vigilance and arousal levels can interfere with the study of brain function with functional MRI (fMRI). However, the difficulty of tracking and modeling arousal state during fMRI typically precludes the assessment of arousal-dependent influences on fMRI measurements. Here, we present evidence that continuous variations in arousal level may be monitored from fMRI data alone and validate this approach with a combination of fMRI, intracortical electrophysiology, and a behavioral measure of arousal. We describe a spatial pattern whose time-varying expression in the fMRI data is found to track both electrophysiological and behavioral arousal fluctuations. These findings have implications for increasing the sensitivity of fMRI as a cognitive and clinical biomarker.