Current neuroscience faces a divide between cognitive function and neural dynamics. Cognitive function is typically studied during task-related activity, while neural dynamics are a key feature of the brain’s spontaneous activity, as measured in the resting state. How are dynamics and cognition connected? Although neural dynamics themselves are well understood, their relationship to—and influence on—cognitive functions remain yet unclear. Addressing this gap is the goal of our paper. For that purpose, we first review recent findings on how dynamic features like neural variability and intrinsic neural timescales (INT) shape various cognitive functions. We then expand our view beyond task-specific foreground activity to the deeper background layers of the brain’s neural activity—its task-unspecific and spontaneous activity. This leads us to propose a Dynamic Layer Model of the Brain (DLB). Drawing on empirical and computational evidence, we demonstrate how neural variability, INT, and other dynamic features (such as scale-free dynamics) connect these three layers of neural activity. Next, we show how these three layers from spontaneous over task-unspecific to task-specific activity mediate four temporal mechanisms through which brain dynamics shape cognition: these range from temporal encoding and integration of input dynamics to temporal scaffolding and segmentation of cognitive output. We conclude that the brain’s neural dynamics operate in the background, shaping the cognitive functions and their contents in the neural foreground in a temporal-dynamic manner. This perspective is at the core of Spatiotemporal Neuroscience, which provides a wider framework than Cognitive Neuroscience by revealing how the brain’s intrinsic dynamics shape our cognition.
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