In the early days of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers mostly analyzed how brain areas responded to a stimulus, whether a light, a noise, or some sort of cognitive task. But as a graduate student at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Bharat Biswal had an unusual request of his fMRI test subjects: climb into the scanner and do, well, nothing. Biswal expected t...

In order to better understand the functional contribution of resting state activity to conscious cognition, we aimed to review increases and decreases in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) functional connectivity under physiological (sleep), pharmacological (anesthesia), and pathological altered states of consciousness, such as brain death, coma, vegetative state/unresponsive wakefuln...

Neuroimaging is ubiquitous; however, neuroimagers seldom investigate the putative impact of posture on brain activity. Whereas participants in most psychological experiments sit upright, many prominent neuroimaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)) require participants to lie supine. Such postural discrepancies may hold important implications for brain function in ...

BACKGROUND The goal of the study was to demonstrate a hierarchical structure of resting state activity in the healthy brain using a data-driven clustering algorithm. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The fuzzy-c-means clustering algorithm was applied to resting state fMRI data in cortical and subcortical gray matter from two groups acquired separately, one of 17 healthy individuals and the secon...