Abstract It is shown that the statistical properties of connections between regions of the brain and their dependence on coarse-graining and thresholding in published data can be reproduced by a simple distance-based physical connectivity model. This allows studies with differing parcellation and thresholding to be interrelated objectively, and for the results of future studies on more finely grained or differently thresholded networks to be predicted. The dependence of network measures on thresholding and parcellation implies that chosen brain regions can appear to form a small world network in many studies, even though the network of individual neurons may not be a small world network itself.