The underlying brain architecture of a person at rest is basically the same as that of a person performing a variety of tasks, a researcher has found. This is important to the study of mental illness, he says, because it is easier to analyze a brain at rest. "We can now observe people relaxing in the scanner and be confident that what we see is there all the time," says the lead researcher, who feared that the study might find that the brain reorganizes itself for every task.