Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

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 and think about a set of objects: drill, hammer, screwdriver, pliers, saw, apartment, castle, house, hut, and igloo (tools vs. dwellings) while laying in an MRI scanner. The patterns of brain activity associated with each category were then used to train a pattern recognition learning program in order to discriminate between these two categories. Subsequent testing of the pattern recognizer showed that it could accurately predict what category of object a subject was viewing based on the pattern of brain activity. Interestingly, there were striking commonalities across subjects in the locations and activation amplitudes of regions for each category suggesting that the brains of different people are using similar neural pathways to represent semantic information. It is easy to imagine that genetic factors regulating human brain development may contribute to this invariance. I’m not sure if I’ll be surprised when this question is answered – perhaps my brain/genome scan will tell me whether I was or not.