EEG Microstates - The Brain as a Sequence of Small Transitions

Perhaps performance is not about staying in the best state, but being able to change when the demand changes

While you read this sentence, something has already changed.

Perhaps your eyes have moved to the next line. Perhaps a sound crossed your attention. Perhaps one word brought up a memory. Even so, if someone asked what you were doing, your answer would probably be simple:

“I was reading.”

We experience continuity. Yet within it, many things change.

In the previous text, we looked at ice and asked what happens when A begins to become B. Now we can move the lens closer:

what happens within us while we seem to remain in the same state?

This is where we encounter EEG microstates.

What just happened in you?

In EEG recordings, certain spatial patterns of electrical potential across the scalp remain nearly stable for tens of milliseconds and then give way to another configuration.

These patterns are called microstates.

We do not need to imagine tiny thoughts moving around the brain. A microstate does not automatically mean “fear,” “memory,” or “self.” Current research itself recommends caution before assigning fixed psychological functions to particular microstate classes.

For now, perhaps it is enough to follow the movement:

a configuration appears.

it remains.

another takes its place.

While we finish a single sentence, several of these small transitions may have occurred.

Perhaps our experience feels continuous not because the brain remains unchanged, but because we are able to continue through change.

How long do we stay before changing?

Now we can ask simple questions.

How long does a configuration remain?

How often does it return?

What tends to appear after it?

Average duration brings us close to the idea of dwell time. We can also observe occurrence, temporal coverage and switching. And we can ask about transition probability:

if we are in A, what is the probability of moving to B, C or D?

Normative studies show that these temporal characteristics are not secondary details. Duration, occurrence and temporal coverage help describe the dynamics of microstates.

Two systems can have the same letters and tell different stories:

A → B → A → B

A → C → D → B

The letters remain.

The sequence changed.

Perhaps dynamics also reside in the way one state gives way to another.

Maybe music has already taught us this

Think about a musical performance that truly moved through you.

We do not always remember only the highest note.

Sometimes we remember the arrival.

The harmony begins to change. The performer holds the tempo, extends a syllable, breathes, increases the intensity, withdraws the weight — and then arrives.

They do not necessarily need to change A or B.

They can transform the way we experience A → B.

Research on musical performance shows that subtle variations in expressive timing can help listeners perceive boundaries between musical phrases. In EEG/ERP experiments, these cues facilitated neural processing of those transitions and directed attention toward structurally relevant musical events.

Expectation, uncertainty and surprise also participate in musical pleasure. Sometimes what moves through us happens while something is ceasing to be what it was, before we fully know what will come next.

Perhaps music makes the arrow audible.

What if the brain is also moving through possibilities?

Here we can introduce a BrainLatam hypothesis.

Do not imagine a small observer inside the brain asking, “Which area should I use?”

Imagine something simpler.

The demand changes.

We need to remember, decide, listen, avoid, respond.

A configuration that worked a moment ago may no longer be adequate now.

So perhaps the question is not:

“Which area switched on?”

but:

“Which configuration can respond better to what is happening now?”

Al Zoubi and colleagues recorded EEG and fMRI simultaneously and found relationships between microstate transitions and changes in BOLD signals in somatomotor, visual, dorsal-attention and ventral-attention networks.

This does not mean:

microstate A = network X.

But it suggests that rapid electrical transitions and functional network reorganization are not completely separate stories.

Perhaps the system moves through a space of possibilities:

some configurations remain longer;

some appear less often;

certain transitions become more probable.

Perhaps performance is not about finding one perfect state, but about reaching an adequate configuration, remaining there long enough, and leaving when the demand changes.

Before A, B, C and D, something was already happening

Now we move the lens closer again.

Before we call a configuration A, cell membranes were already maintaining Na⁺, K⁺, Cl⁻ and Ca²⁺ gradients. Synapses were already transmitting signals. Neurons and astrocytes were already participating in circuit modulation.

Ca²⁺ participates in fundamental mechanisms of neuronal and glial signaling. Astrocytes respond to synaptic activity and neuromodulators associated with arousal through changes in intracellular Ca²⁺. Contemporary work proposes that this dynamic may participate in integrating internal state with sensory context.

Experiments have also shown that disturbing basal astroglial Ca²⁺ can alter the dynamic range of cortical circuits and impair the detection of tactile and thermal stimuli.

But here we need to keep our curiosity larger than our certainty.

We do not know that a particular Ca²⁺ wave produces a particular EEG microstate.

And scalp EEG does not directly measure Ca²⁺.

Perhaps a more useful image is this:

A → B already belongs to a Body-Territory in which ionic, synaptic, glial, electrical, metabolic and vascular processes are happening together.

We separate them in order to study them.

The organism does not need to separate them in order to exist.

BrainLatam summarizes this distinction as:

“We make cuts to learn, not to Be.”

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, perhaps a rapid transition visible in EEG is a macroscopic window onto a multiscale reorganization that was already taking place.

What if the entire sequence also carries information?

Now we do not ask only:

How often does A → B happen?

We ask:

How predictable is A → C → B → D → A?

This is where measures such as entropy rate, excess entropy, Lempel–Ziv complexity and other measures of sequence complexity appear.

They do not measure the same property. Some come closer to describing randomness; others capture statistical structure within the sequence.

So we need to avoid an easy conclusion:

more entropy does not automatically mean more consciousness.

More unpredictability does not mean better performance.

Perhaps the more interesting question is:

what kind of organization exists within change?

Let it come. Let it stay. Let it be. You can disobey. And let it go.

Now we can leave EEG aside for a moment.

Return to yourself.

A thought appears.

A memory.

A desire.

A fear.

Perhaps the first reaction is to push it away:

“I shouldn't be thinking this.”

But it has already arrived.

Let it come.

Not because it is correct. Not because what we feel proves what we believe.

Simply because it has already happened within us.

Let it stay.

For how long?

We do not need to hold onto it or immediately drive it away.

Let it be.

A thought appeared within me. That does not mean:

“I am this thought.”

I felt fear. That does not mean that what my fear says about the world is necessarily true.

And then comes the part that returns agency to us:

You can disobey.

BrainLatam has used this sequence — come, stay, be, disobey and go — as a grammar of freedom: allowing something to be present without transforming its presence into an obligation to obey it.

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, what we think can carry the history of the metabolism that brought us here. But the fact that a thought was produced does not create an obligation to obey it.

And finally:

Let it go.

Perhaps freedom is not controlling everything that arrives.

Perhaps it is being able to let something come without having to keep becoming whatever came.

This sequence is not a scientific description of EEG microstates. It is a BrainLatam practice placed alongside them.

But perhaps we can feel the proximity:

come → remain → be → be able not to obey → go.

And what about our 3.1 seconds?

In W40/2026, we use approximately 3.1 seconds as an operational BrainLatam window for thinking about the integration of a conscious episode sufficiently perceived in the first person.

Microstates do not prove this hypothesis.

We cannot simply add microstates until we reach 3.1 seconds and announce that we have found consciousness.

But within the moment you experience as a single now, many small configurations may have appeared and disappeared.

And you did not experience dozens of selves.

You experienced continuity.

Perhaps unity does not mean the absence of transition.

Perhaps it is integration through transition.

Perhaps performance is also knowing how to leave

A may remain available.

But perhaps we no longer stay there as long.

Perhaps B becomes more accessible.

Perhaps C appears when the territory demands another response.

The same letters remain.

The grammar changes.

And perhaps this is happening to you while you read.

One sentence modifies the previous one. One idea encounters another. You are still you, but perhaps you are no longer standing exactly where you were a few minutes ago.

We do not need to call this Metanoia.

We can simply notice the movement.

Perhaps Jiwasa begins there:

I do not need to explain what happened in you.

We can observe the transition together.

And then the question for the next text emerges:

if we continually need both to remain and to change, how can we be stable without becoming trapped?

How can we change without dissolving?

Perhaps this is where we begin to encounter metastability.

Commented References

Michel, C. M., Brechet, L., Schiller, B., & Koenig, T. (2024). Current State of EEG/ERP Microstate Research. Brain Topography, 37, 169–180. DOI: 10.1007/s10548-024-01037-3.
What this reference represents: it establishes the scientific boundary of the text. Microstates allow us to investigate rapid global EEG dynamics, but important questions about their functional meaning remain open. A, B, C and D should not automatically be transformed into thoughts, emotions or isolated units of consciousness.

Zanesco, A. P. (2024). Normative Temporal Dynamics of Resting EEG Microstates. Brain Topography, 37, 243–264. DOI: 10.1007/s10548-023-01004-4.
What this reference represents: it places time inside the state. It is not enough to know which configuration appeared. We can ask how long it remained, how often it returned and how much of the sequence it occupied. Remaining is also part of the dynamics.

Al Zoubi, O., Mayeli, A., Misaki, M., Tsuchiyagaito, A., Zotev, V., Refai, H., Paulus, M., & Bodurka, J. (2022). Canonical EEG microstates transitions reflect switching among BOLD resting state networks and predict fMRI signal. Journal of Neural Engineering, 18(6), 066051. DOI: 10.1088/1741-2552/ac4595.
What this reference represents: it provides the central bridge of the article. Transitions between microstates were associated with the BOLD dynamics of functional networks. The transition between configurations contains information that isolated states do not reveal.

Istók, E., Friberg, A., Huotilainen, M., & Tervaniemi, M. (2013). Expressive Timing Facilitates the Neural Processing of Phrase Boundaries in Music: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials. PLOS ONE, 8(1), e55150. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0055150.
What this reference represents: it allows the reader to feel transition before encountering the mathematics of transition probabilities. Expressive timing variations help mark musical boundaries. The performer can intensify the arrow without having to change its endpoints.

Gold, B. P., Pearce, M. T., McIntosh, A. R., Chang, C., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2023). Auditory and reward structures reflect the pleasure of musical expectancies during naturalistic listening. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 17, 1209398. DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1209398.
What this reference represents: it shows that expectation, uncertainty and surprise participate in musical pleasure. Perhaps what we feel is not only in A or B, but also in the path through which one begins to give way to the other.

Rasmussen, R. N., Asiminas, A., Carlsen, E. M. M., Kjaerby, C., & Smith, N. A. (2023). Astrocytes: integrators of arousal state and sensory context. Trends in Neurosciences, 46(6), 418–425. DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2023.03.003.
What this reference represents: it opens the scale beneath the microstate. Astrocytes respond to sensory and neuromodulatory signals through Ca²⁺ dynamics. What appears as a macroscopic electrical configuration belongs to an organism already moving across many other scales.

Miguel-Quesada, C., et al. (2023). Astrocytes adjust the dynamic range of cortical network activity to control modality-specific sensory information processing. Cell Reports, 42(8), 112950. DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112950.
What this reference represents: it experimentally shows that disturbances in astroglial Ca²⁺ can modify sensory-circuit dynamics. It does not demonstrate a direct relationship between Ca²⁺ and specific microstate classes. That limitation is precisely what keeps the multiscale BrainLatam hypothesis open and testable.

von Wegner, F., Wiemers, M., Hermann, G., Tödt, I., Tagliazucchi, E., & Laufs, H. (2024). Complexity Measures for EEG Microstate Sequences: Concepts and Algorithms. Brain Topography, 37, 296–311. DOI: 10.1007/s10548-023-01006-2.
What this reference represents: it moves the question from a single transition to the entire sequence. Entropy rate, excess entropy, Lempel–Ziv and other measures do not describe the same thing. It is not enough to ask how much the brain changes; we also need to ask how that change is organized.

BrainLatam. (2026). Carnival Is the Freedom to Come, Stay, Be, Disobey and Go.
What this reference represents: it provides the practical grammar used in the text. It is not presented here as a mechanism of EEG microstates, but as a BrainLatam way of preserving agency in relation to what appears within us: something may come, remain and be perceived without automatically gaining the right to determine our next action.

BrainLatam. (2026). One Event — Metabolism, Movement and Consciousness.
What this reference represents: it supports the multiscale Body-Territory perspective and the formulation “We make cuts to learn, not to Be.” Ions, cells, networks, metabolism, movement and experience can be separated for measurement without requiring us to treat them as separate events while the organism lives.

Hancock, F., Rosas, F. E., Luppi, A. I., et al. (2025). Metastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 26, 82–100. DOI: 10.1038/s41583-024-00883-1.
What this reference represents: it opens the next question in W40/2026. If functioning depends both on remaining and on changing, we need to understand how a system preserves coordination without becoming trapped in a single configuration. It is from this problem that metastability emerges.

W40/2026 -  Latent Heat, Homeostasis and Metanoia