{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"institution":[{"name":"bioRxiv"}],"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,5]],"date-time":"2026-06-05T21:03:44Z","timestamp":1780693424923,"version":"3.54.1"},"posted":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,3]]},"group-title":"Neuroscience","reference-count":55,"publisher":"openRxiv","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,3]],"date-time":"2026-06-03T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1780444800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,3]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract<\/jats:title>\n                <jats:p>\n                  What does the brain do during the continuous, varied experience of watching a story unfold? One account holds that the brain traverses a finite repertoire of recurring states, but whether that repertoire is a stable property of the individual or is reshaped by each new experience has not been tested across diverse naturalistic content within the same person. We characterized the dynamic brain-state repertoire in six individuals who watched the television series\n                  <jats:italic>Friends<\/jats:italic>\n                  across its six seasons during fMRI (up to \u223c146 episodes, \u223c54 hours per person). For each individual we fit a sticky hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden Markov model across all episodes, discovering brain states (recurring whole-brain activity patterns with characteristic coupling) without pre-specifying their number. Each individual\u2019s brain visited roughly forty-five states arrayed along a continuous recurrence gradient, from states active in nearly every episode to episode-specific ones, with no sharp division between them. The repertoire was heterogeneous in why its states recurred: a minority locked to scan-run structure, the majority remaining eligible for content. Transitions were organized by the functional-connectivity similarity between states (per-individual Spearman \u03c1 = 0.33\u20130.55) and, in most individuals, respected resting-state network boundaries. Episode content was associated with which states the brain occupied moment to moment. The recurrence ordering discovered in\n                  <jats:italic>Friends<\/jats:italic>\n                  transferred to state occupancy during other social-narrative films (five of six individuals) and attenuated as stimuli departed from that class, weakening for visual-only reading and audio-only listening. Across diverse narrative experience, the dynamic repertoire is a property of the individual: content varies which states are visited and when, not which states exist.\n                <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.64898\/2026.05.31.729141","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,3]],"date-time":"2026-06-03T22:45:13Z","timestamp":1780526713000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Brain states recur across diverse narrative contexts during longitudinal viewing"],"prefix":"10.64898","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2882-0900","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yibei","family":"Chen","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3052-7412","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Matin","family":"Ghavami","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0004-6315-9702","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Marie","family":"St-Laurent","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Centre de recherche de l\u2019Institut universitaire de g\u00e9riatrie de Montr\u00e9al, Montr\u00e9al, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9111-0699","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lune","family":"Bellec","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Centre de recherche de l\u2019Institut universitaire de g\u00e9riatrie de Montr\u00e9al, Montr\u00e9al, Canada"},{"name":"D\u00e9partement de psychologie, Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, Montr\u00e9al, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5312-6729","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Satrajit S.","family":"Ghosh","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 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