Invariant and heritable local cortical organization as revealed by fMRI.

J Neurophysiol. 2018 Apr 25;:

Authors: Christova P, Georgopoulos AP

Abstract
Neural interactions in local cortical networks critically depend on the distance between interacting elements: the shorter the distance, the stronger the interactions. Here we quantified these interactions in six cortical areas of 854 individuals, including monozygotic and dizygotic twins, non-twin siblings, and nonrelated individuals. We found that the strength of zero-lag correlation between prewhitened, resting-state, BOLD fMRI time series decreased with distance as a power law. The rate of decrease, b, varied among individuals by ~1.9x, was highly correlated between hemispheres but differed among areas (by ~1.2x) in a systematic fashion, becoming progressively less steep from frontal to occipital areas. With respect to twin status, b was significantly correlated between monozygotic twins, less so between dizygotic twins or non-twin siblings, and not at all in nonrelated individuals. These results quantify the lawful, distance-related cortical interactions and demonstrate, for the first time, the heritability of their power law.

PMID: 29694282 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]