RE: Warnings and caveats in brain controllability

The use of network control theory to analyze the organization of white matter fibers in the human brain has the potential to enable mechanistic theories of cognition, and to inform the development of novel diagnostics and treatments for neurological disease and psychiatric disorders (Gu et al., 2015). The recent article (Tu et al., 2018) aims to challenge several of the contributions of (Gu et al., 2015), and particularly the conclusions that brain networks are theoretically controllable from single regions, and that brain networks feature no specific controllability profiles when compared to random network models. Here we provide additional theoretical arguments in support of (Gu et al., 2015) and against the results and methodologies used in (Tu et al., 2018), thus settling that (i) brain networks are controllable from a single region, (ii) brain networks require large control energy, and (iii) brain networks feature distinctive controllability properties with respect to a class of random network models.