The State of the Brain 2025: OHBM leaders and awardees reflect on the science and the community

The “State of the Brain” special issue of Aperture Neuro is now in its third year. Each year, we invite the leaders, award winners, and invited speakers of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) Annual Meeting to reflect on the meeting, the community, their own research, the field of brain imaging as a whole, or another topic they feel is of importance to our community. This open-ended call has been a catalyst for a wide range of valuable, unique, and timely insights and perspectives. The nine papers of “State of the Brain: 2025” included calls to look deeper into the physiological and physical origins of the signals we measure, new framings of functional connectivity, consciousness, and generative modeling; and the expansion of cross-species imaging into rodents. Four of the nine 2025 contributions focused on the health of our community itself. Below is a short summary of each of these thought provoking papers from the 2025 issue, and an introduction to our 2026 iteration. Lastly, we offer our own perspective on the journal and how the field has been evolving in the past year.