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Posts Tagged ‘Functional magnetic resonance imaging’

Sit quietly (with your genome) and discover yourself

Posted in default network, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia This past friday, I attended my first meditation session at my new yoga school.  I love this school and hope – someday – to make it through the full Ashtanga series and other sequences the instructors do.  In the meantime, I found myself sitting on my folded up blanket, letting my mind [...]

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rs35753505 C-alleles make de l’Art Brut of the brain

Posted in Fusiform gyrus, Middle frontal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, NRG1, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

According to wikipedia, “Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (July 31, 1901 – May 12, 1985) was one of the most famous French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century.”  “He coined the term Art Brut (meaning “raw art,” often times referred to as ‘outsider art’) for art produced by non-professionals working outside [...]

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A look inside brains that carry (my) genetic risk for autism

Posted in Cerebellum, CNTNAP2, Frontal cortex, Frontal pole, Fusiform gyrus, Rostral fronto-occipital fasciculus, Thalamus, White matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia The A-to-T SNP rs7794745 in the CNTNAP2 gene was found to be associated with increased risk of autism (see Arking et al., 2008).  Specifically, the TT genotype, found in about 15% of individuals, increases these folks’ risk by about 1.2-1.7-fold.  Sure enough, when I checked my 23andMe profile, I found that I’m [...]

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APOE and the silent brain speak loudly of our destiny

Posted in Cingulate cortex, Hippocampus, Temporal lobe, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

e. e. cummings via last.fm ***PODCAST ACCOMPANIES THIS POST*** In his undergraduate writings while a student at Harvard in the early 1900′s E. E. Cummings quipped that, “Japanese poetry is different from Western poetry in the same way as silence is different from a voice”.  Isabelle Alfandary explores this theme in Cummings’ poetry in her [...]

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rs4680 helps me tonically ponder the Burger King menu and phasically choose the least healthy items

Posted in Cingulate cortex, COMT, Frontal cortex, Hippocampus, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

One of the complexities in beginning to understand how genetic variation relates to cognitive function and behavior is that – unfortunately – there is no gene for “personality”, “anxiety”, “memory” or any other type of “this” or “that” trait.  Most genes are expressed rather broadly across the entire brain’s cortical layers and subcortical systems.  So, [...]

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Thousands of genes together with thousands of resting-state nodes actually makes the genes-to-cognition problem LESS complex

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

DON’T tell the grant funding agencies, but, in at least one way, the effort to relate genetic variation to individual differences in cognitive function is a totally intractable waste of money. Let’s say we ask a population of folks to perform a task – perhaps a word memory task – and then we use neuroimaging [...]

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Recalling finch beaks using variable decision criteria to learn from whence we came

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia In his book, The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner describes the great diversity of finches on the Galapagos Islands – so much diversity – that Darwin himself initially thought the finch variants to be completely different birds (wrens, mockingbirds, blackbirds and “gross-bills”).  It turns out that one of the pivotal events [...]

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Look deeply into my eyes and let me see your genes

Posted in OTR, OXTR, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »

*** PODCAST accompanies this post *** Nowadays, it seems that genomics is spreading beyond the rarefied realm of science and academia into the general, consumer-based popular culture.  Quelle surprise!?  Yes, the era of the personal genome is close at hand, even as present technology  provides – directly to the general consumer public – a  genome-wide [...]

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Sharpening the cognitive-genetic scalpel

Posted in Angular gyrus, Middle frontal gyrus, Supramarginal gyrus, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image by bethd821 via Flickr Whether you are a carpenter, plumber, mechanic, electrician, surgeon or chef, your livelihood depends on a set of sturdy, reliable, well-honed, precision tools.  Similarly, neuroscientists depend on their electrodes, brain scanners, microscopes and more recently their genome sequencers.  This is because they are not just trying to dissect the brain [...]

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NeuroImage on YouTube

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Pointer to: NeuroImage establishes a YouTube Channel with the aim of collaborating with the community with a free-to-view platform for posting and viewing videos related to all areas of neuroimaging.

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Multimodal imaging reveals consistent role for genes as mediators of circuit structure/function

Posted in 5HTT, DARPP32, DLPFC, Dopamine, Frontal cortex, MAOA, tagged , , , , , , , on July 31, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Image by quapan via Flickr Amidst a steady flow of upbeat research news in the behavioral-genetics literature, there are many inconvenient, uncomfortable, party-pooping sentiments that are more often left unspoken.  I mean, its a big jump – from gene to behavior – and just too easy to spoil the mood by reminding your colleagues that, [...]

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Grohol plays Hamlet to Kandel the King

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on June 29, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Amidst the steady stream of basic imaging and genetic science that pours forth into the literature each day (or in response to Eric Kandel‘s latest update on the state of brain science and mental health), how could anyone remain glum?  In Hamlet, the King asks, “How is it that the clouds still [...]

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Facial expressions did not give away genetic risk for schizophrenia

Posted in Amygdala, DLPFC, Frontal cortex, tagged , , , , , on March 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image by ibiscus27 via Flickr One of the difficulties in understanding mental illness is that so many aspects of mental life can go awry – and its a challenge to understand what abnormalities are directly linked to causes and what abnormalities might be consequences or later ripples in a chain reaction of neural breakdown.  Ideally, [...]

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BOLD new inquiry on genetic basis of mental disability

Posted in Actin, ARHGAP18, CDC34, DLPFC, GTPase, RSRC1, TGF-alpha, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia One of the mental functions many of us take for granted is memory – that is – until we’re at the grocery store.  If you’re like me, you dart out of the house confident that you don’t need a list since you’re just going to “pick up a few things” – only [...]

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Privacy violation ? Watching my genes come off, in my brain

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on February 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image by John Carleton via Flickr I’ve heard of mind reading – yes, some folks have actually figured out (here, here, here) how to decode the fMRI signal to literally know what you’re thinking – but am now beginning to wonder where it all ends. In their new paper, “Transcription MRI: A New View of [...]

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Brain biomarkers in action

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image by -kÇ- via Flickr Session 4 of our discussion group, “When Basic Neuroscience Meets Psych Rehab” will meet on Sept 25. This session will cover the topic of ‘affect labeling’ which is one strategy for managing one’s emotions. Did you know there are 3,000+ words you can choose from to describe your feelings ? [...]

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Astrocytes keep the anatomical specificity of BOLD response in tune

Posted in White matter, tagged on April 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia James Schummers, Hongbo Yu and Mriganka Sur present their measurements of Ca++ dynamics in response to visual stimuli in the awake ferret and reveal highly refined patterns of astrocyte activity in their paper, “Tuned Responses of Astrocytes and Their Influence on Hemodynamic Signals in the Visual Cortex” (DOI: 10.1126/science.1156120). The genetic regulation [...]

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Mind reading technology lays groundwork for genetic analysis of thought

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on January 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia OK, the title of this post is fanciful – even for the blogosphere – but the recent open access paper, “Using fMRI Brain Activation to Identify Cognitive States Associated with Perception of Tools and Dwellings” by Shinkareva and team (DOI) is pretty darn amazing. The authors ask subjects to view pictures of [...]

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My genome has seen your face before it seems

Posted in Visual cortex, tagged , on January 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Twin studies are oft used to gauge the role of the genome in behavioral science. A recent report, “Nature versus Nurture in Ventral Visual Cortex: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Twins” by Polk et al., (DOI) shows that brain activity during early stages of visual processing is more similar in [...]

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BOLD thinking with your COX-1

Posted in COX1, White matter, tagged , on January 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Brain images with red and yellow splotches of activity are now ubiquitous in the psychology literature and well on their way, via neuromarketing, to bamboozling consumers everywhere (eg. this splotch shows that 2/3 people really do prefer Pepsi !). When inappropriately used, fMRI methods can devolve quickly into a high-tech form of [...]

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