Harvard scientists have gained new insights into how the brain networks important for thought and remembering are organized in individual people, bringing the notion of using brain scans to help personalize medical treatments one step closer to reality.
Led by Randy Buckner, a Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience, and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, and Rodrigo Braga, a post-doctoral fellow in Buckner’s lab, researchers identified two networks that lie side-by-side in the brain and may play key roles in planning, remembering and imagination. The networks are described in a July 19 paper published in Neuron.
“We’ve known for some time there is a network of brain regions that is involved in memory,” Braga said. “What we’ve done is look at the organization of this network in more detail than ever before by diving deeply into individuals as opposed to looking across groups of - sometimes - thousands of individuals…and by doing so we’ve been able to see a new level of detail.”
To understand this network, Braga and Buckner used MRI to intensively scan the brains of four individuals two dozen times over the course of several months.
What those scans revealed, they said, is that instead of one network there are actually two networks sitting side-by-side in numerous areas of the brain. The networks are, in fact, so intertwined that in some regions, one network is literally surrounded by the other.
Though the newly-discovered networks first appeared to be close copies of one another, closer examination reveals one key difference - one network is connected to memory structures while the other isn’t. The similarities suggest both might have originated in similar processes occurring during brain development and evolution. That critical difference, meanwhile, hints at how evolution has specialized the networks for different aspects of thought.
Source:https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/hu-iii071917.php
Journal article:http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(17)30562-7
Source: Corina Marinescu
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