Finally, we highlight several challenging issues and areas for future research in this rapidly growing field. The characterization of the human brain from a network perspective provides a comprehensive understanding of the structural and functional architectures of the human brain. In this review, we survey recent advances regarding the small-world architecture in human brain networks and highlight the potential implications and applications in multidisciplinary fields, including cognitive neuroscience, medicine and engineering. Moreover, the small-world organization undergoes continuous changes during normal development and ageing and exhibits dramatic alterations in neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Such a network architecture in the human brain facilitates efficient information segregation and integration at low wiring and energy costs, which presumably results from natural selection under the pressure of a cost-efficiency balance. One of the most influential findings is that human brain networks exhibit prominent small-world organization. In the past decade, the combination of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques and graph theoretical approaches enable us to map human structural and functional connectivity patterns (i.e., connectome) at the macroscopic level. Manuscripts reporting MRI data should follow the best practices for reporting and conducting studies using MRI proposed by the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (referred to as COBIDAS criteria, published here )įrontiers in Human Neuroscience is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.Modelling the human brain as a complex network has provided a powerful mathematical framework to characterize the structural and functional architectures of the brain. This journal provides a forum for human research spanning all areas of human cognitive, social, developmental and translational neuroscience using any research approach. As such, human neuroscience research has influenced many areas of inquiry ranging from social and cognitive psychology to economics, law and public policy. How these processes unfold during development, mature in adulthood and often decline in aging, and how they are altered in a host of developmental, neurological and psychiatric disorders, has become increasingly amenable to human neuroscience research approaches. Work in human neuroscience ranges from the cognitive domain, including areas such as memory, attention, language and perception to the social domain, with this last subject addressing topics such as interpersonal interactions, social discourse and emotional regulation. Advances in electrophysiological, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, psychophysical, neuropharmacological and computational approaches have provided key insights into the mechanisms of a broad range of human behaviors in both health and disease. Commentary: Selective Development of Anticorrelated Networks in the Intrinsic Functional Organization of the. The last 25 years have seen an explosive growth in both the methods and the theoretical constructs available to study the human brain. This multidisciplinary open-access journal is at the forefront of disseminating and communicating scientific knowledge and impactful discoveries to researchers, academics, clinicians and the public worldwide. Nagarajan at the University of California are supported by an outstanding Editorial Board of international researchers. Heekeren at the Freie Universität Berlin and Srikantan S. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience is a leading journal in its field, publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research that advances our understanding of the brain mechanisms supporting cognitive and social behavior in humans, in both healthy and diseased states.