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Functional neuroimaging techniques are used widely in cognitive neuroscience to investigate aspects of functional specialization and functional integration in the human brain. Functional integration can be characterized in two ways – functional connectivity and effective connectivity. Whereas functional connectivity describes statistical dependencies between data, effective connectivity rests on a mechanistic model of the causal effects that generated the data. This article reviews the conceptual and methodological bases of established techniques for characterizing functional and effective connectivity using electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging data.

Nogo-A, a membrane protein enriched in central nervous system (CNS) myelin, is a potent inhibitor of regeneration and plasticity in the adult CNS. Adult spinal cord-injured animals show significant behavioral recovery, long-distance regeneration, and compensatory fiber growth after Nogo-A neutralization using clinically relevant methods. Here we review the findings over the past two decades, which are the key to understanding the significance of the inhibitory protein Nogo-A in axon regeneration.