SCSB Colloquium Series: Randy Buckner, Ph.D.

Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Time: 4:00pm-5:00pm, followed by reception
Speaker: Randy Buckner, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Harvard University; Director of Psychiatric Neuroimaging, Massachusetts General Hospital

Talk Title: Beyond The Fictitious Average Brain: Beginning Steps Toward Studying the Individual
Abstract: We have discovered a great deal about human brain organization in the past two decades by taking advantage of averaging over large numbers of individuals and by comparing groups of individuals with certain traits, diagnoses, or average age. Several of these normative discoveries will be discussed including those that connect properties of brain organization with behavioral traits and genetics. However, these explorations have fallen short of providing insight into features of an individual’s circuit organization or functional capacities as are essential to clinical translation and understanding dynamic features of function that fluctuate over time. We need to change course. In this talk I will present our recent efforts to develop an experimental framework for deep phenotyping in the individual over time, including approaches to repeat imaging over dozens of independent sessions and continuous behavioral monitoring using passive activity monitoring, low-burden mobile testing, and dynamic assessments of social interactions and stress. The goals of this work are to refocus our efforts on the individual to observe how an individual’s brain responds to environmental events and intrinsic fluctuations in physiology, and broadly to begin an exploration of the biology of dynamic brain states as they are expressed in the messy real world.