Our brains have 100 trillion synapses that form complex road maps to our personalities. Oxford University‘s new study indicates that brain connectivity correlates to a person’s lifestyle and behaviors.
University scientists from the Center for fMRI investigated the brain connections of 461 people, which they then compared to the subject’s behavior traits and demographic measures. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, revealed that changes in brain connectivity and individual behavior traits lay on one axis–the brain connections of people with positive lifestyles and behaviors varied significantly from the negative ones.
They used data from the NIH-funded Human Connectome Project (HCP), a study by Washington, Minnesota and Oxford universities. The project involved combining MRI scans from 1200 healthy participants with data gathered through tests and surveys.
“The quality of the imaging data is really unprecedented,” explains Professor Smith, the lead author. He added that the number of subjects was large, and the spatial and temporal fMRI resolution was better than previous data-sets.
Image Source: Cultura/Sherbrooke Connectivity Imaging Lab (SCIL)
The Oxford team created an averaged map of 200 functionally distinctive brain processes from the scanned data of 461 participants. They then studied how those regions of the brain communicated with each other for each individual. This resulted in a connectome with details of how those distinct brain regions communicated for each participant and supposedly a map of brain’s strongest connections. Furthermore, they included 280 behavior traits and demographic measures for each individual and performed a “canonical correlation analysis“, a process that reveals relationships between two large data sets of complex variables.
The researchers found strong links among the variations in an individual’s connectome, behavior traits, and demographic measures. The correlation indicated that those with a connectome at one end of the scale scored high for positive traits like vocabulary, memory, life fulfillment, income and education. Conversely, the ones on the other end of the scale had negative traits like rage, rule-breaking, drug addiction and sleep problems. They stated that their results are similar to the “general intelligence g-factor“, a person’s ability at different cognitive tasks.
Many g-factor supporters claim that intelligence-related measures are inter-related and that one who is good at one task is likely to be good at everything. However, the correlation between cognitive abilities and brain circuitry is still unclear.
“It may be that with hundreds of different brain circuits, the tests that are used to measure cognitive ability actually make use of different sets of overlapping circuits,” explains Professor Smith. “We hope that by looking at brain imaging data we’ll be able to relate connections in the brain to the specific measures, and work out what these kinds of test actually require the brain to do.”
Hopefully, the new study may shed better light on brain processes. The team will continue to investigate as more datasets are made available for their study.
Feature Image Source: Brain Cells Created From Skin Cells in Landmark Study by Day Donaldson
