Meet Nancy Kanwisher

(4:42) Nancy Kanwisher, a founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, uses brain imaging to learn about the organization of the mind.

Learn more about Nancy Kanwisher - http://mcgovern.mit.edu/principal-investigators/nancy-kanwisher

[Images/video courtesy of pond5, Joshua Julian]

Category:

Education

Tags:

• mit
• mit techtv nancy
• kanwisher
• brain
• autism
• mind
• mcgovern
• institute
• mri
• fmri
• imaging

[shermanshanti]

Whenever I hear fMRI guys trying to tell me that the human brain is organized in functional modules I could start to freak out. The 'fMRI' signal is an indirect physiological measure of brain activity. All you see is a statistically significant difference between experimental conditions based on blood oxygenation (which is a very slow physiological reaction). The brain is a highly complex network and it relies on a massively parallel and associative architecture.

[shermanshanti]

Detecting a small 'blob' (and in most cases there is not only one single blob alone) and claiming that this is the locus of a particular function simply is not true. But it is often interpreted in such a way. It is no wonder that fMRI people have a modular or materialistic view of the human brain. Another important point is the quite low temporal resolution (several seconds) of fMRI. But the brain is not static. In fact, it works at a millisecond scale.

[shermanshanti]

However, fMRI, or I should better say, fMRI people tend to neglect the time almost entirely. Thus, there is a clear bias towards 3D models of the brain albeit everybody knows that it has to be a 4D model. In other words, other methods such as e.g. EEG and MEG are equally important. And future models of the brain should take this into account more systematically.

[shermanshanti]

We can learn a lot from fMRI, but only if we understand what it does to our minds. We should never forget that all the miraculous properties of the brain can hardly be explained by the pure interplay of single ‘brain parts’ as the brain itself appears to be an emergent system.