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People's brains work differently

18.10.2015

The relationships between areas of the human brain are like fingerprints - they can be used to distinguish one person from another, but at the same time they remain constant, no matter what mental work we do.

We all think and feel differently: someone solves mathematical problems faster, but hardly remembers poetry, someone sobs even at the worst melodramas, someone draws beautifully and is completely indifferent to music. Emotional and cognitive-psychological differences suggest that one person's brains literally work differently than another. But how much does the difference in neurobiological characteristics reflect our individuality? Is it possible to distinguish one individual from another only by the work of the brain?

In their study, Emily S Finn and her colleagues at Yale University used data from the Human Connectome project, which aims to fully describe the structure of connections in the nervous system of the body. Considering that about 100 billion neurons are involved in the neuronal connections of the human brain, it becomes clear how ambitious and time-consuming this task is. We are talking not only about the "drawing" of interneuronal connections, but also about the exact description of the architecture of various blocks and modules of the brain, which differ both anatomically and functionally. Naturally, the methods of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are actively used here, which allows you to see the activity of a particular part of the brain at the time of performing a task. For their purposes, the neuroscientists at Yale took data describing the functioning of 268 brain regions in 126 people and built an activity correlation matrix in which the activity of each of the 268 regions was compared with the work of all others.

In an article in Nature Neuroscience, the authors write that the pattern of interconnected activity in the brain areas was sufficiently individual, that is, it was possible to distinguish one person from another. The goal was not so much to build a dozen or two individual portraits as to understand whether it is possible to detect individual traits in the functional and anatomical parameters of the brain. The method worked perfectly: for example, after a simple brain scan in an fMRI machine, it was possible to say with 99% accuracy that this brain “portrait” belongs to one person, and this one belongs to another. If a volunteer was given some kind of mental task, the accuracy of discrimination dropped to 70%, but still remained quite high. And even if two people thought about different things, the nature of the relationship between brain regions still retained an individual imprint.

Simultaneous activation of the brain areas indicates that the information channels between them work first. That is, when we talk about individual functional and anatomical parameters, we mean the individual adjustment of such connections. For different tasks, different parts of the brain work, but it is in the nature of data exchange, in the operation of information "bridges" that one can find certain general properties that are independent of a specific task, and, moreover, are characteristic of a particular person. The fact that the architecture of relationships has individual features has been known for a relatively long time, but this time it was possible to show that such features can be distinguished even when performing different cognitive tasks. It is worth emphasizing that in this case we are talking not so much about the physical structure, not about the fact that neural “wires” are laid thicker between some areas, and less often between others (although such differences certainly take place), but that they are used with different intensity. So yes, brains work differently, and this can be seen with fMRI.

The strongest individual traits were manifested in the work of the fronto-parietal cortex, where incoming information is filtered. Indeed, looking out the window, someone will see first of all a fight in the yard, and someone will see a bird in a tree; and we can safely say that the psychological differences between us are not least due to the difference in perception. The results obtained can be very useful for psychiatrists and neuropsychiatrists: mental illnesses are determined mainly by symptoms, however, the same symptoms can relate to different disorders, and vice versa, the same disease in one person sometimes manifests itself differently than in another. . And with a personal "portrait" of the brain on hand, it will be possible to more accurately say what exactly is wrong with the patient.

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