Abstract
The brain is an assembly of neuronal populations interconnected by structural pathways. Brain activity is expressed on and constrained by this substrate. Therefore, statistical dependencies between functional signals in directly connected areas can be expected higher. However, the degree to which brain function is bound by the underlying wiring diagram remains a complex question that has been only partially answered. Here, we introduce the structural-decoupling index to quantify the coupling strength between structure and function, and we reveal a macroscale gradient from brain regions more strongly coupled, to regions more strongly decoupled, than expected by realistic surrogate data. This gradient spans behavioral domains from lower-level sensory function to high-level cognitive ones and shows for the first time that the strength of structure-function coupling is spatially varying in line with evidence derived from other modalities, such as functional connectivity, gene expression, microstructural properties and temporal hierarchy.
Highlights
The brain is an assembly of neuronal populations interconnected by structural pathways
Brain activity is constrained by the anatomical substrate on which it manifests, but how functional activity is shaped by the underlying structural connectivity (SC) remains a central question in neuroscience[1]
Using data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), we find that activity in sensory regions, including visual, auditory, and somatomotor, is more strongly coupled with structure, while the opposite is true for higher-level cognitive regions such as parietal, temporal, orbitofrontal ones
Summary
The brain is an assembly of neuronal populations interconnected by structural pathways. We rank brain regions by their structural-decoupling index and explore their behavioral relevance using a meta-analysis of the literature associating specific topic terms to brain areas This shows that characterizing brain areas based on their structure–function relation reveals a macroscale organization of the cortex placing at one side (low structural-decoupling index) areas related to lower-level functions (sensory, motor), while at the other (high decoupling) more complex functions (e.g., memory, reward, emotion). These findings turn out to be highly reliable in terms of test–retest analysis
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