Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 37, Issue 4, 1 October 2007, Pages 1083-1090
NeuroImage

Commentary
A default mode of brain function: A brief history of an evolving idea

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.02.041Get rights and content

Abstract

The concept of a default mode of brain function arose out of a focused need to explain the appearance of activity decreases in functional neuroimaging data when the control state was passive visual fixation or eyes closed resting. The problem was particularly compelling because these activity decreases were remarkably consistent across a wide variety of task conditions. Using PET, we determined that these activity decreases did not arise from activations in the resting state. Hence, their presence implied the existence of a default mode. While the unique constellation of brain areas provoking this analysis has come to be known as the default system, all areas of the brain have a high level of organized default functional activity. Most critically, this work has called attention to the importance of intrinsic functional activity in assessing brain behavior relationships.

Section snippets

The history of a problem

By the early 1980s PET began to receive serious attention as a potential functional neuroimaging device in human subjects. (For a detailed historical account see Raichle, 2000). The study of human cognition with neuroimaging was aided greatly by the involvement of cognitive psychologists in the 1980s whose experimental strategies for dissecting human behaviors fit well with the emerging capabilities of functional brain imaging (Posner and Raichle, 1994). Subtracting functional images acquired

Intrinsic brain activity

Having arrived at the view that the brain has a default mode of function through our analysis of activity decreases, we began to take seriously claims that there was likely much more to brain function than that revealed by experiments manipulating momentary demands of the environment. Two bodies of information have been especially persuasive.

First is the cost of intrinsic activity, which far exceeds that of evoked activity (for a review of this literature see Raichle and Mintun, 2006). It

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