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Linking human behaviour to brain structure: further challenges and possible solutions

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 23, pages 517–518 (2022)Cite this article

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In their timely article, Genon and colleagues review recent developments in MRI studies that aim to link human behaviour to brain structure (Genon, S., Eickhoff, S. B. & Kharabian, S. Linking interindividual variability in brain structure to behaviour. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 23, 307–318 (2022))1. Over the past decade, they argue, the field has witnessed low replicability of research findings and decreases in effect sizes. They point to the adoption of multivariate approaches as one promising path forward. We endorse their insightful suggestions and would like to draw attention to two additional points that, in our opinion, represent key challenges and possible solutions going forward.

Notably, some promising developments are underway to bridge this gap. We want to highlight two such developments: multidimensional and multimodal MRI5. By acquiring multiple structural MRI signals, with each signal reflecting a different weighted sum of structural components, these techniques can disentangle and measure individual structural components such as myelin level6, axon diameter7 and cell morphology8. The measures represent functionally more relevant units of the brain and provide opportunities for mechanistic insights.

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Fig. 1: Lack of one-to-one mapping from MRI to brain structure and from brain structure to behaviour.

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Acknowledgements

The authors received funding from the Wellcome Trust (209192/Z/17/Z to C.S.), H2020 MSCA COFUND (663830-CU119 to C.S.), the Danish Foundation for Research in Neurology (to K.S.) and OPUS (grant 2017/27/B/HS6/00937 to K.S. and R.R.). In addition, the contributions of K.S. and R.R. to this article were based upon work from COST Action CA18106, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Chen Song

  2. Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Kristian Sandberg

  3. Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

    Renate Rutiku

  4. Araya Inc., Tokyo, Japan

    Ryota Kanai

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  1. Chen Song
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Correspondence to Chen Song.

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Song, C., Sandberg, K., Rutiku, R. et al. Linking human behaviour to brain structure: further challenges and possible solutions. Nat Rev Neurosci 23, 517–518 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00614-4

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