Whole-Brain Modelling: Past, Present, and Future

Adv Exp Med Biol. 2022:1359:313-355. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-89439-9_13.

Abstract

Whole-Brain Modelling is a scientific field with a short history and a long past. Its various disciplinary roots and conceptual ingredients extend back to as early as the 1940s. It was not until the late 2000s, however, that a nascent paradigm emerged in roughly its current form-concurrently, and in many ways joined at the hip, with its sister field of macro-connectomics. This period saw a handful of seminal papers authored by a certain motley crew of notable theoretical and cognitive neuroscientists, which have served to define much of the landscape of whole-brain modelling as it stands at the start of the 2020s. At the same time, the field has over the past decade expanded in a dozen or more fascinating new methodological, theoretical, and clinical directions. In this chapter we offer a potted Past, Present, and Future of whole-brain modelling, noting what we take to be some of its greatest successes, hardest challenges, and most exciting opportunities.

Keywords: Connectome; Mean-field; Neural field; Neural mass; Neuroimaging.

MeSH terms

  • Brain*
  • Connectome*