A report of the functional connectivity workshop, Dusseldorf 2002

This report provides a commentary on the issues presented and discussed at the recent "Functional Brain Connectivity" workshop, held in Dusseldorf, Germany. The workshop brought together researchers using different approaches to study connectivity in the brain, providing them with an opportunity to share conceptual, mathematical, and experimental ideas and to develop strategies and collaborations for future work on functional integration. The main themes that emerged included: (1) the importance of anatomical knowledge in understanding functional interactions the brain; (2) the need to establish common definitions for terms used across disciplines; (3) the need to develop a satisfactory framework for inferring causality from functional imaging and EEG/MEG data; (4) the importance of analytic tools that capture the dynamics of neural interactions; and (5) the role of experimental paradigms that exploit the functional imaging of perturbations to cortical interactions.