The Brain as a Crystal Ball: The Predictive Potential of Default Mode Network

dead brain patients (Boly et al., 2009), through its evolution in both healthy and pathological conditions, where DMN show inter-individual differences, abnormalities, and disruptions (for a review see Power et al., 2010). Interestingly, recent evidence on these DMN differences, abnormalities, and disruptions in both connectivity and activity coming from different neuroscientific domains can account for an emerging concept that we named the “predictive value” or “predictive potential” of DMN (Sandrone and Bacigaluppi, 2012). In fact, it is seems that DMN can be used as predictive behavioral markers and as clinical diagnostic tools, thus making the brain a sort of crystal ball. These predictions are highly heterogeneous and the current evidence are scattered between several neuroscientific domains: they range from neurological to psychiatric conditions, and mix up behavioral phenotypes and neuropsychological evidence, in an intriguing parallelism between connectivity and activity.