Whole-brain modeling of neuroimaging data: Moving beyond correlation to causation

Neuroimaging has offered an unprecedented window on human brain activity. While this advance has led to great expectations, many neuroscientists have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of causal insights that this technique has provided into human brain function, in turn, leading to heated discussions on the potential rise of neophrenology. Elsewhere in this book, you can read about the apparent failure of brain imaging to tell us much new or meaningful about thinking and cognition in general. Such views are true to a certain extent; brain imaging often takes indirect measures of neural activity such as blood flow and, just because such brain measures correlate with behavioral output, does not mean that they cause the output. But, these new tools do measure important information about brain activity that could potentially tell us a great deal about brain and mind.