Institutional development · Research, innovation and assessment · Germany
Düsseldorf and Jülich study in PNAS questions cortex-shape models of brain activity
Researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Forschungszentrum Jülich report that spatial patterns derived from cortical geometry describe brain activity but do little to explain how it arises.
Why it matters: Neuroscience groups using patterns derived from the shape of the cerebral cortex to reconstruct brain activity face a published challenge to how much those models explain.
According to the university's announcement, earlier studies had suggested that brain activity can be closely reproduced using spatial patterns derived from the geometric form of the cerebral cortex.
Researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and Forschungszentrum Jülich, a German research centre, examined how meaningful these spatial models actually are.
The researchers concluded that such reconstruction describes brain activity but can hardly explain how that activity arises.
The study has been published in the journal PNAS.
Editor’s view
Scott James, Research and Innovation Editor
Researchers who rely on cortical-geometry models to account for brain activity will, if the HHU and Jülich findings hold, need to treat those models as descriptive rather than explanatory.
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