The ability to visualize whole-brain activity is frequently used in comparing brain function during various sorts of tasks or tests of skill, as well as in comparing brain structure and function between different groups of people. Changes in resting-state brain activation Many previous fMRI studies have seen that spontaneous activation of<unk> ly connected brain regions occurs during the resting state, even in the absence of any sort of stimulation or activity. Human subjects presented with a visual learning task exhibit changes in<unk>  connectivity in the resting state for up to 24 hours and dynamic<unk>  connectivity studies have even shown changes in<unk>  connectivity during a single scan. By taking fMRI scans of subjects before and after the learning task, as well as on the following day, it was shown that the activity had caused a resting-state change in hippocampal activity. Dynamic causal modeling revealed that the hippocampus also exhibited a new level of effective connectivity with the striatum, though there was no learning-related change in any visual area. Combining fMRI with DCM on subjects performing a learning task allows one to delineate which brain systems are involved in various sorts of learning, whether implicit or explicit, and document for long these tasks lead to changes in resting-state brain activation. IQ estimation Voxel-based morphometric measurements of grey matter localization in the brain can be used to predict components of IQ. A set of 35 teenagers were tested for IQ and were fMRI scanned over the course of 3.5 years, and had their IQ predicted by the level of grey matter localization. This study was well-conducted, but studies of this sort frequently suffer from "double-dipping," where a single dataset is used both to identify the brain regions of interest and to develop a predictive model, which leads to overtraining of the model and an absence of real predictive power. The study authors avoided double-dipping by using a "leave-one-out" methodology, that involves building a predictive model for each of the n members of a sample based on data from the other n-1 members. This ensures that the model is independent of the subject whose IQ is being predicted, and resulted in a model capable of explaining 53% of the change in verbal IQ as a function of grey matter density in the left motor cortex. The study also observed the previously-reported phenomenon that a ranking of young subjects by IQ does not stay constant as the subjects age, which confounds any measurement of the efficacy of educational programs. These studies can be cross-validated by attempting to locate and assess patients with lesions or other damage in the identified brain region, and examining whether they exhibit<unk>  deficits relative to the population. This methodology would be hindered by the lack of a "before" baseline measurement, however. Phonological loop The phonological loop is a component of working memory that stores a small set of words that can be maintained indefinitely if not distracted. The concept was proposed by the psychologists Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch to explain how phrases or sentences can be internalized and used to direct action. By using statistical parametric mapping to assess differences in cerebral blood flow between participants performing two different tasks, Paulescu et al. were able to identify the storage of the phonological loop as in the supramarginal gyrii. Human subjects were first split into a control and experimental group. The control group was presented with letters in a language they did not understand, and non-linguistic visual diagrams. The experimental group was tasked with two activities: the first activity was to remember a string of letters, and was intended activate all elements of the phonological loop. The second activity asked participants to assess whether given phrases rhymed, and was intended to only activate certain sub-systems involved in vocalization, but specifically not the phonological storage. By comparing the first experimental task to the second, as well as to the control group, the study authors observed that the brain region most significantly activated by the task requiring phonological storage was the supramarginal gyrii. This result was backed up by previous literature observations of<unk>  deficits in patients with damage in this area. Though this study was able to precisely localize a specific function anatomically and the methods of<unk> and imaging are of great value in determining the brain regions involved in certain information processing tasks, the low-level neural circuitry that gives rise to these phenomena remains mysterious. Psychiatric disorders Although fMRI studies of schizophrenic and bipolar patients have yielded some insight into the changes in effective connectivity caused by these diseases, a comprehensive understanding of the<unk>  remodelling that occurs has not yet been achieved. Montague et al. note that the almost "unreasonable effectiveness of psychotropic medication" has somewhat stymied progress in this field, and advocate for a large-scale "computational phenotyping" of psychiatric patients. Neuroimaging studies of large numbers of these patients could yield brain activation markers for specific psychiatric illnesses, and also aid in the development of therapeutics and animal models. While a true baseline of brain function in psychiatric patients is near-impossible to obtain, reference values can still be measured by comparing images gathered from patients before and after treatment.
Functional integration 
Structural competency
Foreclosure 
Regression 
Gross processing
Stabilization 
Source control 
Gerodiversity