A body-brain-behavioral cross-frequency architecture links biological and behavioral periodicities

Spontaneous behaviors, e.g., walking and speaking, are thought to rely on an internal sense of time that provides a scaffold for precise temporal coordination. Yet the endogenous rates of many behavioral processes often diverge from the arbitrarily defined unit of objective time ( Chronos ), raising a fundamental question: what temporal reference frame coordinates behavior?

Recent theoretical work (Buzsaki, 2026) proposed the rich repertoire of subjective time ( Kairos ) to fluctuate in function of a dynamic cross-frequency architecture linking body-brain periodicities along a lognormal linear progression in the frequency domain. Withing this framework, an emergent sense of time may regulate the rate of semi-periodic behaviors.

Using high temporal resolution multimodal recordings, we show that endogenous body-brain periodicities – including pupil fluctuations, saccadic eye movements, respiration, cardiac activity and neural oscillations - as well as spontaneous behaviors such as tapping, walking, and speaking, are organized as an arithmetic progression in a natural logarithmic frequency space. This observation suggests that a unified scaling law may coordinate complex, multi-scale interactions across biological and behavioral timescales. We propose that such organization may provide an emergent temporal reference frame that scaffolds perception and action.