Abstract
The brain’s operations are mainly intrinsic, involving the acquisition and maintenance of information for interpreting, responding to and predicting environmental demands. The brain’s on-going intrinsic activity (i.e., the resting-state activity) is spontaneous, but this spontaneous activity exhibits a surprising level of spatial and temporal organization across the whole brain. In this study we compared the intrinsic activity with the activity evoked by tasks, and made the comparison at several levels of analysis from a finger-tapping-activated area within the primary sensorimotor cortex to the whole brain. We found that, contrary to our intuition, the intrinsic activity was substantially larger than the task activity and consistently so for all levels of analysis. For the task state, the brain: (1) controlled the intrinsic activity not only during the performance of a task but also during the rest between tasks; (2) activated a task-specific network only when the task was performed but kept it relatively “silent” for other different tasks; and (3) simultaneously controlled the activation of all task-specific networks during the performance of each task.
Highlights
Marcus Raichle explains the operations of the brain being mainly intrinsic, involving the acquisition and maintenance of information for interpreting, responding to and predicting environmental demands[1]
The observed spatial coherence of the intrinsic activity across the brain demonstrates the existence of functional connectivity as expressed in the maps of resting state coherence, and the intrinsic functional connectivity analyses demonstrate the existence of large-scale brain functional connectivity networks[9,10]
Using the task-fMRI, for each participant we identified a FAUPA in the primary sensorimotor cortex (Fig. 1A), and examined the activity within that area from trial to trial (Fig. 1B,C)
Summary
Marcus Raichle explains the operations of the brain being mainly intrinsic, involving the acquisition and maintenance of information for interpreting, responding to and predicting environmental demands[1]. The brain’s on-going intrinsic activity (i.e., the resting-state activity) is spontaneous, but this spontaneous activity exhibits a surprising level of spatial and temporal organization across the whole brain[2,3]. The spatial organization of intrinsic activity appears to transcend levels of consciousness, being present under anesthesia in humans, monkeys, and rats and during the early stages of sleep in humans[3,4,5,6,7,8]. In this study we compared the intrinsic activity with the activity evoked by tasks, and made the comparison at several levels of analysis from a finger-tapping (FT) activated area within the primary sensorimotor cortex to the whole brain. The neural activity was measured as the BOLD signal change squared at each time point, and was subsequently compared between the intrinsic activity and the task activity
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