new Nature paper
has earned a lot of media attention, unusually given that it's a fairly technical and 'basic' piece of neuroscience. In the paper, researchers Matthew F. Glasser and colleagues present a new parcellation (or map) of the human cerebral cortex, breaking the cortex down into 180 areas per hemisphere - many more than conventional maps. But is this, as Nature dubbed it, "the ultimate brain map"? To generate their map, Glasser et al. first downloaded 210 people's data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), including structural MRI, several task-based fMRI sessions, and resting-state fMRI. Then, they averaged the brains and calculated the spatial derivative (gradient) of various metrics across the cerebral cortex. So for instance, one of the structural metrics was myelin content; the myelin gradient shows areas where myelin content differs between neighboring regions.
Glasser et al. looked for areas where two or more metrics both ...
