In neuroanatomy, the precuneus is the portion of the superior parietal lobule on the medial surface of each brain hemisphere. It is located in front of the cuneus. The precuneus is bounded in front by the marginal branch of the cingulate sulcus, at the rear by the parieto-occipital sulcus, and underneath by the subparietal sulcus. It is involved with episodic memory, visuospatial processing, reflections upon self, and aspects of consciousness.
Neuroscience and intelligence refers to the various neurological factors that are partly responsible for the variation of intelligence within species or between different species. A large amount of research in this area has been focused on the neural basis of human intelligence. Historic approaches to studying the neuroscience of intelligence consisted of correlating external head parameters, for example head circumference, to intelligence. Post-mortem measures of brain weight and brain volume have also been used. More recent methodologies focus on examining correlates of intelligence within the living brain using techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), positron emission tomography and other non-invasive measures of brain structure and activity.
Talairach coordinates, also known as Talairach space, is a 3-dimensional coordinate system of the human brain, which is used to map the location of brain structures independent from individual differences in the size and overall shape of the brain. It is still common to use Talairach coordinates in functional brain imaging studies and to target transcranial stimulation of brain regions. However, alternative methods such as the MNI Coordinate System have largely replaced Talairach for stereotaxy and other procedures.
Voxel-based morphometry is a computational approach to neuroanatomy that measures differences in local concentrations of brain tissue, through a voxel-wise comparison of multiple brain images. In traditional morphometry, volume of the whole brain or its subparts is measured by drawing regions of interest (ROIs) on images from brain scanning and calculating the volume enclosed. However, this is time consuming and can only provide measures of rather large areas. Smaller differences in volume may be overlooked. The value of VBM is that it allows for comprehensive measurement of differences, not just in specific structures, but throughout the entire brain. VBM registers every brain to a template, which gets rid of most of the large differences in brain anatomy among people. Then the brain images are smoothed so that each voxel represents the average of itself and its neighbors. Finally, the image volume is compared across brains at every voxel.
Connectomics is the production and study of connectomes: comprehensive maps of connections within an organism's nervous system. More generally, it can be thought of as the study of neuronal wiring diagrams with a focus on how structural connectivity, individual synapses, cellular morphology, and cellular ultrastructure contribute to the make up of a network. The nervous system is a network made of billions of connections and these connections are responsible for our thoughts, emotions, actions, memories, function and dysfunction. Therefore, the study of connectomics aims to advance our understanding of mental health and cognition by understanding how cells in the nervous system are connected and communicate. Because these structures are extremely complex, methods within this field use a high-throughput application of functional and structural neural imaging, most commonly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electron microscopy, and histological techniques in order to increase the speed, efficiency, and resolution of these nervous system maps. To date, tens of large scale datasets have been collected spanning the nervous system including the various areas of cortex, cerebellum, the retina, the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular junctions.
Gyrification is the process of forming the characteristic folds of the cerebral cortex. The peak of such a fold is called a gyrus, and its trough is called a sulcus. The neurons of the cerebral cortex reside in a thin layer of gray matter, only 2–4 mm thick, at the surface of the brain. Much of the interior volume is occupied by white matter, which consists of long axonal projections to and from the cortical neurons residing near the surface. Gyrification allows a larger cortical surface area, and hence greater cognitive functionality to fit inside a smaller cranium.
Anders Martin Dale is a prominent neuroscientist and professor of radiology, neurosciences, psychiatry, and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and is one of the world's leading developers of sophisticated computational neuroimaging techniques. He is the founding Director of the Center for Multimodal Imaging Genetics (CMIG) at UCSD.
Resting state fMRI is a method of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that is used in brain mapping to evaluate regional interactions that occur in a resting or task-negative state, when an explicit task is not being performed. A number of resting-state brain networks have been identified, one of which is the default mode network. These brain networks are observed through changes in blood flow in the brain which creates what is referred to as a blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal that can be measured using fMRI.
Statistical shape analysis and statistical shape theory in computational anatomy (CA) is performed relative to templates, therefore it is a local theory of statistics on shape. Template estimation in computational anatomy from populations of observations is a fundamental operation ubiquitous to the discipline. Several methods for template estimation based on Bayesian probability and statistics in the random orbit model of CA have emerged for submanifolds and dense image volumes.
OpenNeuro is an open-science neuroinformatics database storing datasets from human brain imaging research studies.
Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) is a framework for specifying models, fitting them to data and comparing their evidence using Bayesian model comparison. It uses nonlinear state-space models in continuous time, specified using stochastic or ordinary differential equations. DCM was initially developed for testing hypotheses about neural dynamics. In this setting, differential equations describe the interaction of neural populations, which directly or indirectly give rise to functional neuroimaging data e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) or electroencephalography (EEG). Parameters in these models quantify the directed influences or effective connectivity among neuronal populations, which are estimated from the data using Bayesian statistical methods.
John-Dylan Haynes is a British-German brain researcher.
Rahul Desikan was an Indian-American neuroscientist and neuroradiologist. He was an Assistant Professor of Radiology & Biomedical Imaging, Neurology and Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-director of Laboratory for Precision Neuroimaging. Desikan's achievements became publicly known in a Washington Post article detailing his lifelong commitment to preventing and treating Alzheimer's disease and his continuing work as a scientist living with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Desikan was vocal about the need for increased awareness and research funding for ALS, and voiced his unique perspective as both ALS researcher and ALS patient in op-ed articles appearing in a regular column in the Washington Post as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle and Scientific American.
Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.
The occipital face area (OFA) is a region of the human cerebral cortex which is specialised for face perception. The OFA is located on the lateral surface of the occipital lobe adjacent to the inferior occipital gyrus. The OFA comprises a network of brain regions including the fusiform face area (FFA) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) which support facial processing.
Dimitri Van De Ville is a Swiss and Belgian computer scientist and neuroscientist specialized in dynamical and network aspects of brain activity. He is a professor of bioengineering at EPFL and the head of the Medical Image Processing Laboratory at EPFL's School of Engineering.
Neural synchrony is the correlation of brain activity across two or more people over time. In social and affective neuroscience, neural synchrony specifically refers to the degree of similarity between the spatio-temporal neural fluctuations of multiple people. This phenomenon represents the convergence and coupling of different people's neurocognitive systems, and it is thought to be the neural substrate for many forms of interpersonal dynamics and shared experiences. Some research also refers to neural synchrony as inter-brain synchrony, brain-to-brain coupling, inter-subject correlation, between-brain connectivity, or neural coupling. In the current literature, neural synchrony is notably distinct from intra-brain synchrony—sometimes also called neural synchrony—which denotes the coupling of activity across regions of a single individual's brain.
CAT is a free and open source software package used for the analysis of structural brain imaging data, in particular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Developed by Christian Gaser and Robert Dahnke of the Structural Brain Mapping Group at the University of Jena, CAT is an extension of the SPM software.
