Reflections on current trends in functional MRI — The State of the Brain 2025

This invited contribution to the State of the Brain series is a commentary on advancements, opportunities and challenges that have been emerging in brain mapping and were highlighted at the educational courses and in the keynote lectures of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) 2025 Annual Meeting. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been a major driver of progress in brain mapping over the past years, and has continued to furnish us with new tools, new insights and new questions. In my capacity as Education Chair, I will summarize some of the highlighted techniques at this year’s meeting, but also the unanswered questions that will be dogging these techniques, particularly in terms of their biological interpretations. By extension, I will discuss the potential impact of fMRI-based brain-mapping tools for the rapidly growing topic of precision brain stimulation. In these regards, I propose that the investigation into the brain’s physiological underpinnings, beyond what is currently offered by big-data fMRI, needs more attention from the OHBM community if fMRI is to realize its full potential in neuroscientific and clinical discoveries.