Authors - N. Ahana Priyanka, R. Harishkanna, R. Sneka Nandhini Abstract - Financial markets are widely modeled as rational systems. However, practical evidence suggests that collective decision-making is influenced by interacting emotionally, risk-based, and control mechanisms. To capture this intricacy, this study introduces the Financial Connectome, a neuroscience-inspired pipeline that models the market as a collective cognitive network. This work investigates the long-standing disconnect between neuroscience and finance by mutually analyzing value, risk, sentiment, and control processes at the market level. Building on neurobiological theories of decision-making, a Neuro-Decision Systems (NDS) framework is suggested to examine the market dynamics reorganization under systemic stress. The framework is applied to 1,516 trading days of the NIFTY Bank Index spanning 2017–2023, encompassing the COVID-19 crisis period. The results indicate a significant structural reconfiguration of market states. The Neuro-Decision Score (NDS) exhibits a statistically significant post-COVID shift toward risk dominance, with Kolmogorov–Smirnov, permutation, and Mann–Whitney U tests all rejecting the null hypothesis (p < 0.001). In addition, average state persistence increases by approximately 24%, indicating greater temporal rigidity in market dynamics. The ML-generalized NDS further strengthens the distributional separation, increasing the observed effect size from small to medium magnitude. Post-pandemic markets exhibit heightened sensitivity, reflected by higher activation frequencies across all cognitive systems. These findings suggest that market behavior undergoes measurable cognitive reorganization during periods of extreme uncertainty. The framework provides a structured approach for analyzing regime reconfiguration under sustained uncertainty.
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