Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience Systems Neuroscience

Abstract

magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans, and electrophysi-ology in anesthetized cats – with results in each case demonstrating that SOA exhibits reproducible spatiotemporal patterns that can be linked to underlying neural circuits. Using fMRI, Biswal et al. (1995) demonstrated that spontaneous activity within a functional sensorimotor network showed strong covariation even when that network was completely at rest, a phenomenon they dubbed " functional connectivity " based largely on previous electrophysiological In the same year, Arieli et al. (1995) used electrophysiological and optical techniques to show that patterns of intrinsic electrical activity in the visual cortex of anesthetized cats is coordinated at spatial scales up to several millimeters. Over the next decade, fMRI studies in humans and electrophysi-ological studies in animals elaborated the degree of organization of SOA signals. Functional connectivity computed from fMRI collected during rest revealed multiple distinct " networks " of covary-ing (i.e., functionally connected) areas (for a review, see Fox and Raichle, 2007). Early studies focused on cortical networks (Lowe et al. Relatively few imaging studies have been conducted in animal models to date, but the basic pattern of resting state networks appears similar in monkeys