CRCNS: Collaborative Research: A Common Model of the Functional Architecture of Human Cortex

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The human brain is perhaps the most complex known object and is the vessel that contains our thoughts, experiences, knowledge, and, collectively, our culture. Although brains have similar anatomical components, differences in size and shape and in fine structure make it difficult to discern how different brains can contain similar thoughts and knowledge that can be shared and communicated. A major challenge for brain science is to build a common model of the functional architecture of the brain that captures these similarities that are shared across brains at a fine scale. The research in this project is aimed at developing a computational basis for such a common model. The model is based on measurement of patterns of brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants engage in everyday cognitive activities like watching a movie, listening to a story, or free-ranging thought while at rest. The model aligns the functional architecture of the brain at multiple scales, from fine to coarse, and captures far more shared structure than is possible with other methods that are based on alignment of brain anatomy. This model will provide infrastructure that can be used by scientists who image the brain in order to study a wide range of brain functions, from perception to social interaction, emotion, and decision making, allowing them to describe the mechanisms underlying these functions in a format that can be communicated across laboratories with a level of detail and precision that will accelerate discovery and application. Alignment of brain imaging data has relied on anatomical features that have a variable correspondence to the underlying functional architecture. Moreover, such alignment methods do not capture the fine structure of brain activity patterns that can be decoded using modern pattern analytic methods. The research in this project is based on aligning representational spaces across brains, rather than anatomical topographies, and will identify the boundaries between patches of cortex with distinct representational spaces. This innovation affords greatly superior alignment of functional architecture across brains and the development of a common model of the human brain. The research will develop computational algorithms for transforming the idiosyncratic organization of individual brains into the common representational spaces and for fine-tuning the description of individual brains by projecting, or shrink-wrapping, the common model based on a large number of individuals onto that individual brain. The development of these computational algorithms and the model will be integral to the training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. They will be made available as free and open-source software, with large shared data sets, to be shared and used freely by brain imaging scientists around the world, providing essential research infrastructure to maximize the impact and benefit of this research project.