The Importance of Being Variable

New work suggests that blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal variability can be a much more powerful index of human age than mean activation, and that older brains are actually less variable than younger brains. However, little is known of how BOLD variability and task performance may relate. In the current study, we examined BOLD variability in relation to age, and reaction time speed and consistency in healthy younger (20-30 years) and older (56-85 years) adults on three cognitive tasks (perceptual matching, attentional cueing, and delayed match-to-sample). Results indicated that younger, faster, and more consistent performers exhibited significantly higher brain variability across tasks, and showed greater variability-based regional differentiation compared with older, poorer-performing adults. Also, when we compared brain variability- and typical mean-based effects, the respective spatial patterns were essentially orthogonal across brain measures, and any regions that did overlap were largely opposite in directionality of effect. These findings help establish the functional basis of BOLD variability, and further support the statistical and spatial differentiation between BOLD variability and BOLD mean. We thus argue that the precise nature of relations between aging, cognition, and brain function is underappreciated by using mean-based brain measures exclusively.