Correspondence of the brain's functional architecture during activation and rest

TLDR

Neural connections that underlie functional networks exist regardless of momentary activity. The study aims to determine how much brain regions interact continuously during rest. The authors identified activation networks from thousands of BrainMap studies and independently extracted resting‑state networks from 36 fMRI subjects. Activation and resting networks correspond closely, indicating that the brain’s full functional repertoire remains dynamically active even at rest.

Abstract

Neural connections, providing the substrate for functional networks, exist whether or not they are functionally active at any given moment. However, it is not known to what extent brain regions are continuously interacting when the brain is "at rest." In this work, we identify the major explicit activation networks by carrying out an image-based activation network analysis of thousands of separate activation maps derived from the BrainMap database of functional imaging studies, involving nearly 30,000 human subjects. Independently, we extract the major covarying networks in the resting brain, as imaged with functional magnetic resonance imaging in 36 subjects at rest. The sets of major brain networks, and their decompositions into subnetworks, show close correspondence between the independent analyses of resting and activation brain dynamics. We conclude that the full repertoire of functional networks utilized by the brain in action is continuously and dynamically "active" even when at "rest."