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Charting the human brain’s lifelong functional organization

Neuroscientists have created a continuous atlas showing how patterns of functional connectivity between brain regions change from birth to old age.
By
  1. Richard A. I. Bethlehem

    1. Richard A. I. Bethlehem is in the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UK.

  2. Daniel S. Margulies

    1. Daniel S. Margulies is in the Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 9DU, UK, and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, France.

The human brain does not develop uniformly. Areas that are devoted to basic senses mature first, whereas those that support abstract thought take decades to reach their full potential. These broad maturational trajectories have been previously established for structural properties (such as volume and thickness) of different parts of the brain1, but charting the arcs of functional organization in a similar way has been an ongoing challenge. Writing in Nature, Taylor et al.2 provide such a chart, tracking how three fundamental axes of brain organization emerge, mature and decline across the human lifespan.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00637-2

References

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Competing Interests

R.A.I.B. is a founder, advisory board member and equity holder in Centile Bioscience Inc.

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