The precise mechanisms behind the generation of time fields and whether other structures organize according to the time kept in the hippocampus remain to be seen,

but Kraus et al. (2013) make it clear that time and place coexist in the hippocampus. D.C.R. is supported by the Marie Curie Foundation (GA-2011-301674). M.B.M. is supported by the Kavli Foundation and a Centre of Excellence grant from the Norwegian Research Council. “
“Spontaneous or endogenously driven neural activity has been a focus of investigation in electrophysiology Hydroxychloroquine mouse for many decades (Buzsáki, 2009). In recent years, researchers have focused on fluctuations in blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) activity acquired during a “task-free” or “resting” state, as the spatiotemporal structure of these signals has proven richly informative about the functional organization of the human brain (Raichle, 2011). Resting-state dynamics are commonly characterized via “functional connectivity,” which describes the statistical dependence of activity

at different locations in the brain. Resting-state functional connectivity is often computed via a Pearson correlation of fMRI BOLD signal time series recorded from different Ulixertinib in vivo voxels. Despite the unconstrained mental state in resting-state fMRI experiments, patterns of functional connectivity across the brain are quite reproducible within individuals and across large cohorts of participants (Biswal et al., 2010). This observation suggests that functional connectivity may be shaped by the underlying anatomical connectivity. This notion has gained support from direct

comparisons of anatomical and functional connectivity from in the monkey (Vincent et al., 2007) and human (Honey et al., 2009) brain, as well as from interventional studies demonstrating changes in functional connectivity after manipulations of the anatomical substrate (Johnston et al., 2008). In addition, computational models combining cellular biophysics and networks of synaptic connections can generate realistic functional connectivity patterns (Deco et al., 2011). Despite the growing promise of BOLD functional connectivity, important questions remain concerning the optimal data acquisition and analysis methods (Cole et al., 2010) and the spatiotemporal scales at which dynamical correlations usefully indicate functional properties of the brain. Does functional connectivity recorded with fMRI (a slow and indirect neural observation) relate to functional connectivity recorded more directly with invasive electrophysiological methods? Does anatomical connectivity predict resting-state BOLD functional connectivity at spatial scales finer than a cubic millimeter? Can patterns of correlation in the BOLD signal reveal intra-areal functional topographies? In this issue of Neuron, Wang et al. (2013) make significant progress toward addressing these questions. Their focus is on connectivity within area 3b and area 1 of the squirrel monkey somatosensory cortex.