> "Present findings provide functional data supporting the hypothesis that modafinil can modulate the cortico-cerebellar connectivity of the aging brain"
I would love it if someone more knowledgeable of neuroscience explained what this meant and what the potential implications could be.
Functional connectivity is just temporally correlated neural activation (technically for fmri we are measuring blood oxygenation, but whatever). So we might have regions a, b, c and d, and find that a and b tend to be co-activated, but that c tends to de-activate when a or b are activated, while d's activity is uncorrelated with any of the others. For example, insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex are usually positively corellated with each other, but negatively correlated with regions of the default mode network. Modulation just means that the manipulation, in this case modafinil, changed the correlation between neural activation in different brain regions, in this case between cortical regions and the cerebellum.
I would love it if someone more knowledgeable of neuroscience explained what this meant and what the potential implications could be.