The Global Signal and Observed Anticorrelated Resting State Brain Networks

Resting state studies of spontaneous fluctuations in the functional MRI (fMRI) blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal have shown great promise in mapping the brain's intrinsic, large-scale functional architecture. An important data preprocessing step used to enhance the quality of these observations has been removal of spontaneous BOLD fluctuations common to the whole brain (the so-called global signal). One reproducible consequence of global signal removal has been the finding that spontaneous BOLD fluctuations in the default mode network and an extended dorsal attention system are consistently anticorrelated, a relationship that these two systems exhibit during task performance. The dependence of these…