Summary: Neuroscientists have created a detailed practical map of the brain showing how it reacts to difficult scenes by analyzing ultrasound scans of moviegoers. This study examined how professional functions shift between simple and demanding scenes by identifying 24 distinct processing networks that process features like faces, speech, and movements.
The study mapped regions that respond to various audio-visual stimulation using machine learning from data from the Human Connectome Project. The findings was guide future research on how specific head responses change as people age or have mental disorders.
Important Information:
- Searching brains during video monitoring highlighted 24 networks for certain control, like social interactions and object reputation.
- While simpler scenes install language or sensory regions, more complicated scenes activate professional control areas.
- The second extensive functional map using a variety of film clips was created under natural circumstances.
Origin: Cell Press
Neuroscientists have developed the most comprehensive useful map of the brain to date by scanning people’s brains while watching movie clips.
The ultrasound examination, publishing November 6 in the Cell Press journal , Neuron, shows how various head networks light up when participants viewed small clips , from a range of separate and Hollywood films including , Inception,  , The Social Network, and , Home Alone.
The group identified distinct mental networks involved in running scenes with people, inanimate objects, actions, and discourse. Additionally, they revealed how various professional sites are prioritized during follow-the-money and easy-to-follow scenes.  ,
The first author and neuroscientist Reza Rajimehr of Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) says,” Our work is the first attempt to map out the different brain regions and networks under naturalistic conditions.”
Different areas of the brain have a lot of interconnectedness, and these connections create practical networks that affect how we respond to and respond to stimuli. Although the majority of studies of brain efficient networks have been conducted using ultrasound images of resting people, many areas of the brain or cortex remain unresponsive in the absence of outside stimulation.
In this study, the researchers wanted to know whether watching films while undergoing brain monitoring may reveal how the body’s useful networks respond to difficult audio and visual stimuli.
” With resting-state fMRI, there is no stimulus—people are just thinking internally, so you do n’t know what has activated these networks”, says Rajimehr.
” But with our video signal, we may go back and examine how various brain regions are responding to various scene responses.”
The researchers used whole brain imaging from 176 young people as part of a formerly collected fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project to image the head during the participants ‘ 60-minute-long viewing of short videos from a range of independent and Hollywood movies.
The researchers used machine learning techniques to identify brain networks, particularly those located within the cerebral cortex, to average the brain activity across all participants. Then, they examined how activity within these different networks related to the movie’s scene-by-scene content—which included people, animals, objects, music, speech, and narrative.
Their analysis revealed 24 different brain networks that were associated with specific aspects of sensory or cognitive processing, for example recognizing human faces or bodies, movement, places and landmarks, interactions between humans and inanimate objects, speech, and social interactions.
They also showed an inverse relationship between “executive control domains “—brain regions that enable people to plan, solve problems, and prioritize information—and brain regions with more specific functions.
When the movie’s content was difficult to follow or ambiguous, there was heightened activity in executive control brain regions, but during more easily comprehendible scenes, brain regions with specific functions, like language processing, predominated.
When the cognitive load is high, executive control domains are typically active in challenging tasks, says Rajimehr.
” It looks like when the movie scenes are quite easily comprehendible, for example if there’s a clear conversation going on, the language areas are active, but in situations where there is a complex scene involving context, semantics, and ambiguity in the meaning of the scene, more cognitive effort is required, and so the brain switches over to using general executive control domains”.
The researchers claim that future research could examine how brain network function differs between people, between people of different ages, or between people with developmental or psychiatric disorders because the analyses in this paper were based on average brain activity.
” In future studies, we can look at the maps of individual subjects, which would allow us to relate the individualized map of each subject to the behavioral profile of that subject”, says Rajimehr.
” Now, we’re studying in more depth how specific content in each movie frame drives these networks —for example, the semantic and social context, or the relationship between people and the background scene”.
Funding:
The McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Iranian Cognitive Science and Technology Council, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, and a Cambridge Trust scholarship provided funding for this study.
About this information on brain mapping research
Author: Kristopher Benke
Source: Cell Press
Contact: Kristopher Benke – Cell Press
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
” Functional anatomy of the cerebral cortex while watching naturalistic movies” by Reza Rajimehr et al. Neuron
Abstract
Functional anatomy of the cerebral cortex while watching naturalistic movies
A fundamental step in understanding how different types of information are processed in the brain is to identify the functional organization of the cerebral cortex. However, it is still unclear how these areas are organized during naturalistic visual and auditory stimulation.
We used high-resolution functional MRI data from 176 human subjects to study the entire cerebral cortex’s macroarchitecture based on responses to a 60-minute audiovisual movie stimulus for this study.
A data-driven clustering approach revealed a map of 24 functional areas/networks, each explicitly linked to a specific aspect of sensory or cognitive processing.
Novel features of this map included an extended scene-selective network in the lateral prefrontal cortex, separate clusters responsive to human-object and human-human interaction, and a push-pull interaction between three executive control ( domain-general ) networks and domain-specific regions of the visual, auditory, and language cortex.
Our cortical parcellation provides a comprehensive, cohesive map of the cerebral cortex’s functional domains.
