‘Brainquakes’ Detected in Psychotic Disorders Could Reframe How We See Schizophrenia

Researchers report a new pattern of abrupt disruptions in brain connectivity—dubbed "brainquakes"—that occur more often in people with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. These events reflect a shift in how brain networks balance redundant and synergistic processing, and may help explain why affected brains show more irregular, seemingly random communication across regions.

What Are Brainquakes? Brainquakes describe brief, recurring disturbances in network connectivity. The study frames them as an altered balance between redundancy (overlapping signals that make processing robust) and synergy (complementary signals that enable richer information integration). In people with psychotic disorders, the researchers found a tilt toward more disorganized, less predictable network states.

"In this study, we provide converging evidence suggesting that the psychotic brain exhibits states of randomness across both spatial and temporal dimensions," wrote Qiang Li, a computational neuroscientist at the TReNDS Center in Atlanta, and colleagues.

The team analysed resting-state functional scans from 1,111 participants: 288 diagnosed with schizophrenia, 183 with bipolar disorder, and 640 healthy controls. Each scan lasted roughly five minutes, and the analysis focused on higher-order interactions among brain regions.

Brainquakes were observed significantly more often in participants with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder than in controls, especially in regions linked to emotion, memory and sensory processing. The researchers liken these dynamics to active volcanoes—networks that show sudden, recurrent disruptions rather than stable activity.

Limitations and Next Steps

All participants were psychiatrically stable at the time of scanning and the images were collected at rest; therefore these brainquakes are not necessarily markers of acute psychotic episodes. The five-minute scan length limits conclusions about the timing, frequency and triggers of these events. The authors call for longer recordings and longitudinal studies to determine whether brainquakes contribute to cognitive symptoms and the onset of psychosis, or whether they arise as a consequence of underlying illness.

Researchers note related advances—such as risk biomarkers and known triggers for psychosis (for example, high-potency cannabis)—but emphasize that the brain’s complexity makes causal inference challenging. The new findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, offer a promising avenue for understanding multiscale changes in brain organization in psychotic disorders and could guide future therapeutic strategies.