1. fMRI – “Pluripotentiality” vs. “Degeneracy”
Based on Noppenney Friston and Price J. Anat. (2004) 205, pp433–442

2. Tasks apparently tapping different ‘cognitive functions’ activate the same regions
Fig. 3. Peaks of activation in fronto-parietal areas associated with: (A) attention, (B) working memory, (C) episodic
retrieval, and (D) conscious perception, extracted from the studies listed in Tables 1–4, respectively. Blank areas
indicate the regions with highest level of common regional brain activity across functions, namely bilateral BA 7 and
BA 40, left BA 6, and right BA 9. Only the peaks in (or adjacent to) these regions are shown.
H.R. Naghavi, L. Nyberg / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 390–425

3. Pluripotentiality (one to many)
Function 3
Structure A
Function 2
State functions?
Common processing stage? Or
True pluripotentiality?
Function 1
If pluripotentiality – at what level? Lobe? Region? Ansemble? Single neuron?

4. Degeneracy (many to one)
Structure C
Function 1
Structure B
Structure A
Different normal strategies?
Normal anatomical variation?

5. Fig. 2 Normal activation patterns during a semantic paradigm
Fig. 2 Normal activation patterns during a semantic paradigm. (a) Regions that were consistently activated across all 12 subjects
(P < 0.05 corrected). (b,c) Single subject data to illustrate intersubject variability. Circles highlight activations that are specific to
only one subject.

6. Level of description determines Pluripotent\Degenerate
Structure:
Multiple regions (network)
Single regions
Neuronal assemplies\populations
Single neurons
Function
E.g. “sentence comprehension” vs. [word recognition; working memory; syntactic parsing…”
The level of description determines whether we say there is degeneracy\pluripotentiality or not - for example, there may be a one to one relationship between a region and a function, but a many to one (degenerate) when considering assemblies. Like wise

7. Degenerate or not?
קריאת מילים
“orthographic”
“phonology”

8. The spatial resolution
Intrinsic resolution is determined by the physiology
Precision depends on the voxel size + distrotions
Distinguishing two foci is hindered by intersubject variability
Neuronal adaptation technique