From Circuit Principles to Human Psychiatric Disorders

Abstract

Progress in mapping the human brain using diffusion tensor imaging and similar tractography approaches has raised hopes that noninvasive methods can be leveraged to understand connections in humans and their change in brain diseases. These hopes rest on the knowledge that the primate cortex is a complex communication center, whose disruption is at the core of psychiatric diseases [e.g., (1)]. We provide an overview of principles derived from the study of the systematic variation of the cortex and connections in nonhuman primates to highlight how they can be used to inform the specificity of connections with imaging of the human brain.