NeuroNames is an integrated nomenclature for structures in the brain and spinal cord of the four species most studied by neuroscientists: human, macaque, rat and mouse. It offers a standard, controlled vocabulary of common names for structures, which is suitable for unambiguous neuroanatomical indexing of information in digital databases. Terms in the standard vocabulary have been selected for ease of pronunciation, mnemonic value, and frequency of use in recent neuroscientific publications. Structures and their relations to each other are defined in terms of the standard vocabulary. Currently NeuroNames contains standard names, synonyms and definitions of some 2,500 neuroanatomical entities.
The nomenclature is maintained by the University of Washington and is the core component of a tool called "BrainInfo". BrainInfo helps one identify structures in the brain. One can either search by a structure name or locate the structure in a brain atlas and get information such as its location in the classical brain hierarchy, images of the structure, what cells it has, its connections and genes expressed there. Information can be accessed by any of some 16,000 synonyms in eight languages.
Grey matter, or brain matter in American English, is a major component of the central nervous system, consisting of neuronal cell bodies, neuropil, glial cells, synapses, and capillaries. Grey matter is distinguished from white matter in that it contains numerous cell bodies and relatively few myelinated axons, while white matter contains relatively few cell bodies and is composed chiefly of long-range myelinated axons. The colour difference arises mainly from the whiteness of myelin. In living tissue, grey matter actually has a very light grey colour with yellowish or pinkish hues, which come from capillary blood vessels and neuronal cell bodies.
Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling.
Brodmann area 9, or BA9, refers to a cytoarchitecturally defined portion of the frontal cortex in the brain of humans and other primates. Its cytoarchitecture is referred to as granular due to the concentration of granule cells in layer IV. It contributes to the dorsolateral and medial prefrontal cortex.
Brodmann area 47, or BA47, is part of the frontal cortex in the human brain. It curves from the lateral surface of the frontal lobe into the ventral (orbital) frontal cortex. It is below areas BA10 and BA45, and beside BA11. This cytoarchitectonic region most closely corresponds to the gyral region the orbital part of inferior frontal gyrus, although these regions are not equivalent. Pars orbitalis is not based on cytoarchitectonic distinctions, and rather is defined according to gross anatomical landmarks. Despite a clear distinction, these two terms are often used liberally in peer-reviewed research journals.
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.
Dual stream connectivity between the auditory cortex and frontal lobe of monkeys and humans. Top: The auditory cortex of the monkey (left) and human (right) is schematically depicted on the supratemporal plane and observed from above. Bottom: The brain of the monkey (left) and human (right) is schematically depicted and displayed from the side. Orange frames mark the region of the auditory cortex, which is displayed in the top sub-figures. Top and Bottom: Blue colors mark regions affiliated with the ADS, and red colors mark regions affiliated with the AVS. Material was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Neuroinformatics is the emergent field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
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.
The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility is an international non-profit organization with the mission to develop, evaluate, and endorse standards and best practices that embrace the principles of Open, FAIR, and Citable neuroscience. INCF also provides training on how standards and best practices facilitate reproducibility and enables the publishing of the entirety of research output, including data and code. INCF was established in 2005 by recommendations of the Global Science Forum working group of the OECD. The INCF is hosted by the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. The INCF network comprises institutions, organizations, companies, and individuals active in neuroinformatics, neuroscience, data science, technology, and science policy and publishing. The Network is organized in governing bodies and working groups which coordinate various categories of global neuroinformatics activities that guide and oversee the development and endorsement of standards and best practices, as well as provide training on how standards and best practices facilitate reproducibility and enables the publishing of the entirety of research output, including data and code. The current Directors are Mathew Abrams and Helena Ledmyr, and the Governing Board Chair is Maryann Martone
Integrative neuroscience is the study of neuroscience that works to unify functional organization data to better understand complex structures and behaviors. The relationship between structure and function, and how the regions and functions connect to each other. Different parts of the brain carrying out different tasks, interconnecting to come together allowing complex behavior. Integrative neuroscience works to fill gaps in knowledge that can largely be accomplished with data sharing, to create understanding of systems, currently being applied to simulation neuroscience: Computer Modeling of the brain that integrates functional groups together.
NeuroLex is a lexicon of neuroscience concepts supported by the Neuroscience Information Framework project, which is funded by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. It is the lexical part of the NIF knowledge base, and NeuroLex is intended to make literature review easier and ensure consistent terminology and usage across researchers for the topics of experimental, clinical, and transnational neuroscience, and for genetic and genomic resources. It is structured as a semantic wiki, using Semantic MediaWiki.
The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a five-year project sponsored by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health, split between two consortia of research institutions. The project was launched in July 2009 as the first of three Grand Challenges of the NIH's Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. On September 15, 2010, the NIH announced that it would award two grants: $30 million over five years to a consortium led by Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota, with strong contributions from University of Oxford (FMRIB) and $8.5 million over three years to a consortium led by Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California Los Angeles.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to brain mapping:
John-Dylan Haynes is a British-German brain researcher.
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.
NeuroVault is an open-science neuroinformatics online repository of brain statistical maps atlases and parcellations.
David C. Van Essen is an American neuroscientist specializing in neurobiology and studies the structure, function, development, connectivity and evolution of the cerebral cortex of humans and nonhuman relatives. After over two decades of teaching at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, he currently serves as an Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience and maintains an active laboratory. Van Essen has held numerous positions, including Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuroscience, Secretary of the Society for Neuroscience, and the President of the Society for Neuroscience from 2006 to 2007. Additionally, Van Essen has received numerous awards for his efforts in education and science, including the Krieg Cortical Discoverer Award from the Cajal Club in 2002, the Peter Raven Lifetime Achievement Award from St. Louis Academy of Science in 2007, and the Second Century Award in 2015 and the Distinguished Educator Award in 2017, both from Washington University School of Medicine.
Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED) is a conceptual and software framework that includes a family of controlled vocabularies for annotating experimental metadata and experienced events on the timeline of neuroimaging and behavioral experiments. The goal of HED is to standardize annotations and the mechanisms for handling these annotations to enable searching, comparing, and extracting data of interest for analysis. HED is the event annotation mechanism used by the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) standard for describing events.
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