If you’ve ever felt an attachment to coffee, Russell Poldrack’s brain shares your pain—or so it appears, according to his newly published data. Poldrack drew blood and scanned his brain twice a week for 18 months—which makes his brain the most studied brain in the world—and has already made some interesting discoveries. (Although he needs your help making more.)
Poldrack began his experiment at the University of Texas before finishing it at Stanford, in the hopes of achieving a greater understanding of how different parts of the brain talk to each other and how this behavior changes with time.
At any given moment, many different regions of the brain are probably communicating with each other, assuring that the proper actions are taken to deal with whatever situation is at hand. This crosstalk happens across dozens of networks—collectively known as the connectome.
According to his paper in Nature Communications, Poldrack aimed to study these connections by climbing into an MRI machine every Tuesday and Thursday for a year and a half, having his brain scanned for 10 minutes. On Tuesdays, he further fasted and had his blood drawn, in order to analyze the connections between brain behavior and genes. For each scan, Poldrack attempted to do more or less absolutely nothing.
“I would get in the MRI and basically close my eyes and zone out while it took a picture of my brain every second for 10 minutes,” he said in a statement. “Once we had that data, we could get ideas of which regions of my brain are talking to each other by how correlated they are over time. This tells us how much connectivity there is within each network.”
Caffeine radically changes brain connectivity
This connectivity was surprisingly consistent across the months, although there were some changes of note. For example, on the days he fasted: “Easily the biggest factor we found in terms of affecting my brain connectivity was whether I had had breakfast and caffeine or not,” Poldrack said.
On these days, when he was scanned before he drank his coffee, his connections rearranged themselves—an influence that had never been seen before. Specifically, the connections between the somatosensory motor network (which deals with moving your body and the sense of touch) and the systems in charge of higher vision (i.e. seeing fine detail as opposed to the larger, rougher picture) grew significantly tighter.
“That was totally unexpected, but it shows that being caffeinated radically changes the connectivity of your brain,” Poldrack said. “We don’t really know if it’s better or worse, but it’s interesting that these are relatively low-level areas.
“It may well be that I’m more fatigued on those days, and that drives the brain into this state that’s focused on integrating those basic processes more.”
The blood draws also yielded interesting results, as the change in expression of genetic material (RNA) from his white blood cells strongly correlated to his brain activity.
The results, of course, are limited to Poldrack’s state of mind (pun intended)—but the data is so useful, he hopes others of diverse backgrounds will follow his lead.
“I’m generally a pretty happy and even-keeled person,” he says. “My positive mood is almost always high, and my negative mood is almost always non-existent. It would be interesting to scan people with a wider emotional variation and see how their connections look over time.”
Looking to others for help
Scans from others may help researchers discover differences between healthy brains and those of patients with neurological disorders that may stem from disrupted connectivity—like schizophrenia.
Of course, the researchers have only scratched the surface of the enormous quantity of data from Poldrack’s scans—and so have put the entire dataset online with various tools, in the hopes that others will discover new connections he never considered. Not that all of it can be understood at the moment.
“It’s a hard dataset to know what to do with, because it’s hard to tell if something is noise or if it’s real with just one person. But there’s potentially some really interesting stuff here,” he said. “There are a ton of relationships between brain connectivity and gene expression in the blood, that are clearly there and seem to be strong, but we just don’t have a way to understand them based on current neuroscience.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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