Düsseldorf/ Jülich, 26 March 2018 - As neuroscience enters the era of big data bases, a new approach could offer a deeper and more systematic understanding of brain function, HBP scientists argue in an article in the current issue of the renowned journal Trends in Cognitive Science.

To uncover connections between brain regions and specific cognitive functions, neuroscientists have long made extensive use of techniques like functional resonance imaging (fMRI). First introduced in the 1990’s, the method allows tracking the brain’s activity while a test subject performs a task or responds to stimuli in the MRI scanner. To date, fMRI has been employed in thousands of studies to determine the "locations" of a wide variety of behavioral functions in the brain. In spite of this, it has proved difficult to understand specific functions and complex interaction of brain areas and networks. For regions like the hippocampus, long lists of associated tasks have been described, but so far, the many individual results have not produced a conclusive picture.

A team of brain imaging researchers from Düsseldorf and Jülich in Germany now propose a new approach. The scientists are contributors to the multinational European Human Brain Project. Key to their idea is a reversal of the current practice: Instead of starting with pre-defined behavioral functions and then trying to assign brain regions, the areas would be selected first and then taken through a wide ranging statistical screening for potential behavioral associations, resulting in a "behavioral profile". Recently established large data bases of neuroimaging data provide the basis for this new bottom up approach, which, they argue, could help to reveal the "core functions" of brain areas.
"These basic operational functions would be the missing link between behavioral functions described by Psychology and the brain mapping community", explains first author Sarah Genon, a researcher at University Hospital Düsseldorf and Research Center Jülich in Germany. In the European Human Brain Project, she heads the task Multimodal comparison of whole-brain maps. "Many approaches to the description of human behavior and its dysfunction, not only from the many psychology fields, but also fields like psychiatry, neurology, or economics have produced rich knowledge, but mapping them onto the brain results in a kind of conceptual chaos", Genon says. A psychologist by training who previously used fMRI to study Alzheimer’s disease, she knows both sides. "It has been difficult for these fields and scientists interested in brain organization to find a common language."

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