Looking at connections between brain regions
Some clarifications on class project I’m in process of setting up and having meetings with people who’ve requested them Clarifications: Any topic is fine if it is somewhat brain-related in a broad sense Doesn’t need to be about fMRI, pattern- classification, neural representational structure, etc. No specific template is required (e.g. NSF, NIH) “Template”: express key ideas clearly enough to get into someone’s head and stick there
Example time-courses TIME Time-course of task versus rest periods Task MRI signal from voxel that correlates well with task: Active Signal from voxel that does NOT correlate with task: Inactive TIME
“Functional connectivity” Instead of asking: How well does this voxel’s time-course correlate with the task? Ask: How well do these voxel time-courses correlate with each other?
Types of connectivity From: Park & Friston, Science, 2013
More ways of looking at connectivity Turk-Browne, N. B. (2013). Functional Interactions as Big Data in the Human Brain. science, 342(6158), 580-584.
The brain is very richly inter-connected From: Felleman & Van Essen, 1991
Looking at time-course correlations Buckner, R. L., Krienen, F. M., & Yeo, B. T. (2013). Opportunities and limitations of intrinsic functional connectivity MRI. Nature neuroscience, 16(7), 832- 837.
Connectivity changes as a function of task Turk-Browne, N. B. (2013). Functional Interactions as Big Data in the Human Brain. science, 342(6158), 580-584.
The “default mode network” (DMN) Buckner, R. L., Krienen, F. M., & Yeo, B. T. (2013). Opportunities and limitations of intrinsic functional connectivity MRI. Nature neuroscience, 16(7), 832-837.
Multiple “intrinsic networks” Buckner, R. L. et al, Nature Neurosci, 2013.
How informative is the resting state? Example: how healthy is someone? Resting state heart-rate of athletes is lower than resting heart-rate of non-athletes But: A more direct test would be to put someone on a treadmill and measure how their heart- rate and jogging speed correlate
Anatomical connectivity: Diffusion tensor imaging
Anatomical connectivity: Diffusion directions in white matter http://www.humanconnectome.org
Anatomical connectivity: Diffusion tensor tractography http://www.humanconnectome.org
Beware of –omics? Science involves a lot of things, one of which is measuring stuff Therefore, if you measure a lot of stuff, then you must be doing science (?) There do exist interesting –omics questions, but beware of the danger of atheoretical “measuring stuff”