“…However, no matter how the brain is measured, it is obvious that the brain's natural state is inherently variable (see "Variance" in Fig. 1) (Arieli et al, 1996;Miller et al, 2002;Laskaris et al, 2003;Neumann et al, 2003;Huettel et al, 2004;Faisal et al, 2008;McIntosh et al, 2008). Current evidence suggests substantial intrasubject variability in the blood oxygen leveldependent (BOLD) signal within and across testing sessions, but BOLD signal variance is often discounted as merely reflecting issues with task, image acquisition and preprocessing, statistical power, reliability, or other nuisance effects (Aguirre et al, 1998;Miller et al, 2002;Neumann et al, 2003;Huettel et al, 2004;Smith et al, 2005;Andrews-Hanna et al, 2007;Jones et al, 2008).…”