It is the objective of a population neuroscience study to target major principles of brain organization. We highlight those regions of the DMN that are most robustly involved in patterns of within- and between-network interactions. However, both the hard boundaries of our DMN definition and their deviations through the registration process (cf. refs. 42–44) may obscure certain aspects of the underlying function (15, 42, 45). In particular, it is unclear in our current analyses whether DMN subregions highlight areas with homogeneous patterns of neural activity with a unified functional purpose, or whether they describe areas where the interleaving of different neural function occurs, which may represent “a generalized anatomic mechanism for processing information from two or more cortical sources in the central nervous system” (ref. 46, p. 792).
