The brain regions associated with executive control and appetitive drive have been extensively probed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and many observed differences in activation in these brain regions have been associated with alcohol use, abuse, and dependence, suggesting that multiple brain regions can contribute to the poor decision making and risky behaviors seen in alcoholism (for a review, see (Camchong et al., 2013a)). Recent work suggests that faulty co-activation or synchrony of multiple brain regions comprising “networks,” or an imbalance between opposing brain networks, is important in alcoholism. Network synchrony is often referred to in the literature as “functional connectivity,” and resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used to investigate different properties of brain networks, such as spatial specificity, magnitude of the synchrony among its constituent components, or timing of event processing.
