Samir Suweis — Università degli Studi di Padova #
Warning & Caveats in Brain Controllability #
There is large consensus that the complex, self-organizing structure of the human brain can be well described by the mathematical framework based on network theory. Recently1, it has been proposed to characterize brain networks in terms of their “controllability”, drawing on concepts and methods of control theory. The analysis of controllability has the potential to unveil how specific nodes and/or sets of nodes control the dynamics of the entire network and thus might provide insights on whether manipulating the local activity of specific nodes would fully or partially restore network functions after brain damage. In this talk I will briefly summarise the theoretical framework of brain network controllability, and I will present results that challenge the state of the art knowledge on brain controllability. We conclude that, though theoretically intriguing, our understanding of the relationship between controllability and structural brain network remains elusive and we are far to translational applications of this concept.