Aug 20, 2020 06:48 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 20, 2020 06:48 PM by C C.)
https://www.wired.com/story/a-radical-ne...ts-wiring/
EXCERPTS: . . . “The overwhelming amount of evidence is saying that if you want to understand brain function, symptoms, brain disease, that the fundamental unit of how the brain operates is not a brain region but a brain circuit,” says Michael Fox, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
Even at the level of single cells, brains show plentiful evidence of their networked character. “Neurons are not spherical—neurons have a cell body, and then they have this long tail that allows them to connect to many other cells,” Danielle Bassett says. “You can even look at the morphology of the neuron and say, ‘Oh, well, connectivity has to matter. Otherwise, it wouldn’t look like this.’” To Bassett, network neuroscience isn’t simply a new way to study the brain, a technique that can bring insights from diverse fields into neuroscience. It is, rather, a way to get closer to the brain’s essence, how it truly works.
“The brain literally is a network,” agrees Olaf Sporns [...] “It’s not a metaphor. I’m not comparing apples and oranges. I think this is literally what it is.” And if network neuroscience can produce a clearer, more accurate picture of the way that the brain truly works, it may help us answer questions about cognition and health that have bedeviled scientists since Broca’s time. “Now we’ve widened the aperture,” says Sporns. “We’re looking at the whole system.”
[...] Scientists have related brain networks to traits like personality, psychiatric diagnosis, and performance on a smorgasbord of psychological tests. Finn used the distinct patterns of brain connectivity she found in each of her subjects to successfully guess how well they would do on an intelligence test; more recently, a group of researchers at CalTech was able to use subjects’ individual brain networks to predict how open they were to new experiences. And in some cases, network analysis provides clear advantages over traditional methods. “Network phenotypes can be more powerful to predict if someone is likely to develop a disorder,” says Petra Vértes, who has used network neuroscience to study disorders ranging from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. Recently, Vértes has worked on projects that have used networks to identify PTSD patients who are unlikely to respond to psychotherapy and to associate abnormalities in the brains of schizophrenic individuals with specific genes.
The network approach has proven to be particularly well suited to understanding schizophrenia, although it has been applied to every class of mental illness... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . “The overwhelming amount of evidence is saying that if you want to understand brain function, symptoms, brain disease, that the fundamental unit of how the brain operates is not a brain region but a brain circuit,” says Michael Fox, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
Even at the level of single cells, brains show plentiful evidence of their networked character. “Neurons are not spherical—neurons have a cell body, and then they have this long tail that allows them to connect to many other cells,” Danielle Bassett says. “You can even look at the morphology of the neuron and say, ‘Oh, well, connectivity has to matter. Otherwise, it wouldn’t look like this.’” To Bassett, network neuroscience isn’t simply a new way to study the brain, a technique that can bring insights from diverse fields into neuroscience. It is, rather, a way to get closer to the brain’s essence, how it truly works.
“The brain literally is a network,” agrees Olaf Sporns [...] “It’s not a metaphor. I’m not comparing apples and oranges. I think this is literally what it is.” And if network neuroscience can produce a clearer, more accurate picture of the way that the brain truly works, it may help us answer questions about cognition and health that have bedeviled scientists since Broca’s time. “Now we’ve widened the aperture,” says Sporns. “We’re looking at the whole system.”
[...] Scientists have related brain networks to traits like personality, psychiatric diagnosis, and performance on a smorgasbord of psychological tests. Finn used the distinct patterns of brain connectivity she found in each of her subjects to successfully guess how well they would do on an intelligence test; more recently, a group of researchers at CalTech was able to use subjects’ individual brain networks to predict how open they were to new experiences. And in some cases, network analysis provides clear advantages over traditional methods. “Network phenotypes can be more powerful to predict if someone is likely to develop a disorder,” says Petra Vértes, who has used network neuroscience to study disorders ranging from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. Recently, Vértes has worked on projects that have used networks to identify PTSD patients who are unlikely to respond to psychotherapy and to associate abnormalities in the brains of schizophrenic individuals with specific genes.
The network approach has proven to be particularly well suited to understanding schizophrenia, although it has been applied to every class of mental illness... (MORE - details)