611-Methodological Limitations in Lesion Network Mapping

Paper Talk · Mar 9, 2026 · 22m

This article from Nature Neuroscience critically evaluates Lesion Network Mapping (LNM), a popular neuroimaging technique used to link brain injuries to psychiatric and neurological disorders. The authors highlight a major procedural flaw where diverse conditions like addiction, depression, and epilepsy appear to map onto nearly identical brain circuits. Their mathematical analysis reveals that LNM fundamentally simplifies into a repetitive sampling of the same normative connectivity data, regardless of the specific disease being studied. Consequently, the resulting maps frequently reflect…