Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill have created what they describe as a kind of functional growth chart for the brain—a map showing how large-scale brain networks are organized from the first days of life through old age.
The work gives scientists a new way to understand how the brain’s functional architecture changes across the lifespan and what “typical” patterns of brain organization look like at different ages.
Doctors use growth charts to track height and weight over time. This study applies a similar idea to the brain. Instead of measuring body size, the researchers mapped how different parts of the brain communicate with one another at each stage of life.
To do this, the team analyzed resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) scans, which measure small changes in blood oxygen that reflect brain activity. During these scans, participants are not asked to perform a task—they simply rest quietly in the scanner. That allows researchers to observe the brain’s intrinsic functional organization.
The dataset spanned nearly the full human lifespan, from shortly after birth to 100 years of age. In total, the researchers studied 3,972 scans from 3,556 healthy participants drawn from five large public imaging studies.
“This gives us a reference map of how the brain is typically organized at different ages,” said Hoyt Patrick Taylor IV, Ph.D., postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Radiology at UNC–Chapel Hill and lead author of the study. “The long-term goal is to better understand how brain development and aging unfold—and how that picture may differ in disease.”
Three major patterns of brain organization
The researchers focused on the cortex, the brain’s outer layer, which supports perception, thought, memory, and decision-making.
Rather than dividing the cortex into sharply separated regions, the team studied it using gradients—smooth, large-scale patterns that describe how brain areas are functionally related to one another. Gradients capture the fact that the cortex is organized more like a continuum than a set of isolated boxes.
Across the lifespan, three major patterns stood out:
- A pattern running from regions involved in vision, hearing, and touch to regions involved in more abstract thinking
- A pattern separating visual regions from areas involved in movement and bodily sensation
- A pattern separating attention and control systems from systems linked to memory, internal thought, and reflection
Together, these gradients provide a compact picture of how the cortex is organized.
The fastest changes happen early
The study found that the largest shifts in brain organization happen very early in life.
In infancy and early childhood, the cortex is organized more strongly around sensory and motor systems—networks that help babies and young children see, hear, move, and interact with the world. As development continues, brain systems involved in higher-order thinking become more distinct.
The most dramatic changes occurred during the first four years of life, highlighting just how rapidly the brain is functionally reorganized during that period.
Different brain patterns mature on different timelines
The researchers also found that these gradients do not all follow the same developmental schedule.
Two of the major gradients—the one spanning sensation to higher cognition and the one spanning control to internally oriented thought—continued to strengthen through childhood and adolescence, reaching their clearest form in the late teen years and early adulthood. After that, they gradually became less pronounced with advancing age.
A third gradient, which separates visual systems from sensorimotor systems, followed a different path. It appeared to reach its strongest expression much earlier, around early childhood, and then slowly weakened across the rest of life.
That suggests that different aspects of brain organization mature—and age—on different clocks.
Why it matters
The researchers also asked whether these patterns are related to cognition.
In young adults, people whose brain organization more closely matched the typical pattern for one key gradient tended to perform better on a range of cognitive measures, including memory and processing speed.
The team then compared these functional gradients with other features of the brain. They found that the link between functional organization and brain structure was strongest early in life and weakened with age. They also found that patterns of gene expression aligned most strongly with these gradients early in development, suggesting that genes may help establish an early blueprint that later experience refines over time.
“These gradients are not just visual patterns,” said Pew-Thian Yap, PhD, professor in the Department of Radiology at the UNC School of Medicine and senior author of the study. “They capture fundamental aspects of brain organization that relate to behavior, structure, and biology.”
A resource for future brain research
The researchers say the new atlas is intended as a scientific reference rather than a diagnostic tool. By providing a common framework for studying brain organization across age, it may help researchers compare findings across labs and datasets more consistently.
Over time, tools like this could also help scientists better understand conditions that affect brain development, aging, or both.
Reference: Hoyt Patrick Taylor IV, Khoi Minh Huynh, Kim-Han Thung, Guoye Lin, Wenjiao Lyu, Weili Lin, Sahar Ahmad, and Pew-Thian Yap. Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan. Nature. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10219-x
Funding: This study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) through grants R01MH125479 and R01MH133836, by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) through grants R01EB008374 and R01 EB035160, and by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) through grant R01NS134849.