What’s in a functional brain parcellation?

Gaël Varoquaux, Kamalakar Dadi, Arthur Mensch

TL;DR: All functional brain parcellations are wrong, but some are useful

Keywords: brain atlases, functional units

Abstract: To communicate, to ground hypotheses, to analyse data, neuroscientists often refer to divisions of the brain. Here we consider atlases used to parcellate the brain when studying brain function. We discuss the meaning and the validity of these parcellations, from a conceptual point of view as well as by running various analytical tasks on popular functional brain parcellations.