New Lab Reveals Brain’s Inner Workings

Construction began this month on a new laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine designed to give researchers a first-hand look at the inner workings of the brain.

When complete, the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory will house two functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, valued at about $3 million each, to be used solely for research.

"Since MRIs are so expensive, researchers typically have had to use them at night, after the hospitals are finished scanning patients," said Ron Fisher, M.D., Ph.D., administrative director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and an assistant professor of neuroscience and radiology at Baylor. "Having our own is a great luxury and an advantage to our research. Only a handful of research institutions in the United States have such scanners dedicated solely for research."

Functional magnetic resonance imaging allows researchers to see which part of the brain is active when exposed to stimuli. In a study published last year, Baylor and Emory University scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure changes in human brain activity in people who received a sequence of fruit juice and water squirts in the mouth. They found that the ventral striatum, a reward center in the brain that is activated by cocaine, was also turned on by juice squirts - but only if the sequence of juice squirts was unpredictable. The research provides insight into addictive diseases and decision-making disorders in humans.

Led by Read Montague, Ph.D., a professor of neuroscience and director of the laboratory, Baylor is collaborating with Princeton University and Emory on a study in which participants interact socially over the internet while having their brains scanned, a process Montague has named "hyperscanning." Interactions will include playing competitive video games and performing cooperative tasks on a digital screen. Baylor is the monitoring site for this study, and soon will be able to scan its own participants in the new laboratory for future studies.

"With the construction of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, we hope to attract some of the world’s top researchers from a variety of fields who want to investigate the relationship between the brain and behavior," Fisher said.

The laboratory is part of Baylor’s Institute for Brain and Behavior, a joint effort between Baylor’s departments of neuroscience and psychiatry to investigate and treat brain disorders.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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