A language network in the individualized functional connectomes of 1199 human brains doing arbitrary tasks

Abstract

A century and a half of neuroscience has yielded many divergent theories of the neurobiology of language. Two factors that likely contribute to this situation include (a) conceptual disagreement about language and its component processes, and (b) intrinsic inter-individual variability in the topography of language areas. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of small numbers of intensively scanned individuals have argued that a language-selective brain network emerges bottom-up from correlations (individualized functional connectomics, iFC) in task-free (e.g., rest) or task-regressed activation timecourses. Here we tested this hypothesis at scale and evaluated its practical utility for task-agnostic language localization: we apply iFC separately to each of 1,957 (fMRI) scanning sessions (1,199 unique brains), each consisting of diverse tasks. We found that iFC indeed revealed a largely left-hemisphere-dominant frontotemporal network that was more stable within individuals than between them, robust to the granularity of the parcellation, and selective for language. These results support the hypothesis that this network is a key structure in the functional organization of the adult brain and show that it can be recovered retrospectively from arbitrary imaging data, with implications for neuroscience, neurosurgery, and neural engineering. Shain & Fedorenko examined patterns of correlated activity in the brains of 1,199 people and found that these patterns revealed an integrated brain network selective for language, even when the person was doing something non-linguistic.