Chandra Boon's List: Brain Research Sites

• Researchers have shown that functional brain networks have the potential to help physicians probe psychiatric and developmental disorders.
• "That's typically looking at the data from a structural point of view
• MRI also offers ways to analyze how different parts of the brain work together functionally

• Schlaggar and his colleagues use an approach to brain scanning called resting state functional connectivity. By correlating increases and decreases in blood flow to the various brain regions as subjects rest in the scanner, scientists determine which of these regions work together in brain networks.

   

  In a study published in 2009, Washington University scientists showed that as the brain matures, these brain networks change. The overall organization switches from networks involving regions physically close to each other, which is the dominant motif in a child's brain, to networks that connect distant regions, the primary organizational principal in adult brains.
• lead author Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD, a pediatric neurology resident at St. Louis Children's Hospital
• Dosenbach used data from five-minute MRI scans of 238 normal subjects ranging in age from 7 to 30. The support vector machine analyzed approximately 13,000 functional brain connections and selected the best 200 produce a single index of the maturity of each subject.

4 more annotations...

• et a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur
• the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.
• starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.
• Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don't match reality,
• "Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit in us premonitions of the near future,” Changizi said.

3 more annotations...