MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2016 | Page 27

ing information spontaneously, but
very little is known about how this
communication relates to someone’s
ongoing behavior and experience.”
Which brings us back to the question of mind-wandering.

“An understanding
of the neural building blocks that make
up our spontaneous
thoughts could allow
us to better address
fundamental questions about human
experience.”

Kucyi and colleagues reasoned that,
because mind-wandering has been
associated with fluctuations in attention, as in the out-of-the-zone
states they explored in the Cerebral
Cortex study, they could wield their
new understandings of these states
to probe neural processes related to like, how do human thought patmind-wandering. They are now do- terns emerge? and how do people
ing this in a follow-up study.
make decisions on a moment-tomoment basis?
The findings from the ongoing work
will be illuminating, especially as Improving management of attennew insights into the underlying tion-deficit and other disorders
brain dynamics would tell us about
more than mind-wandering. “An Uncovering the neural underpinunderstanding of the neural build- nings of fluctuations in attention
ing blocks that make up our spon- can also have implications for clinitaneous thoughts could allow us to cal care.
better address fundamental questions about human experience,” Attention and its role in everyday
Kucyi said. Among these: questions life come into play in almost all
neurological and psychiatric con-

ditions. With attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder, for instance,
people have trouble focusing and
can get stuck in “out of the zone”
states and in mind-wandering. Conversely, chronic pain can lead those
who suffer to ruminate on their
pain—behavior that involves cognitive processes reflected in the brain
networks described in the Cerebral
Cortex study and in Kucyi’s previous
research.
Given this, deeper understandings
of how the brain’s attention system
works—on a fine-grained, momentto-moment basis—could have a
significant impact on care. Such
understandings could be “critical to
advancing our knowledge of these
conditions,” said Eve Valera, an
ADHD researcher in the Martinos
Center and the senior author of the
Cerebral Cortex study, “and to developing more individualized treatment approaches.”
Additional authors on the study include Michael Hove, Michael Esterman, and R. Matthew Hutchison.

Researchers Report Most Advanced Human Brain Atlas
The MGH Martinos Center’s Bruce Fischl has partnered with the Allen Institute for Brain Science to produce the highest resolution atlas
of the human brain to date—an atlas so detailed researchers can use
it to explore the structural basis of human brain function.
It enables this by combining different types of high-resolution information: microstructural properties that can only be seen under a microscope and macroscopically visible structures that can be imaged
without distortion with MRI.
“The microscopic imaging allows a detailed neuronatomical labeling,
while the MRI enables the linkage of these labels to in vivo studies via nonlinear warping,” said Fischl, Director
of the Computational Core in the Martinos Center and a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School.
The atlas, reported in the Journal of Comparative Neurology in September 2016, is available at brain-map.org.