Brain development and aging
These questions were put to the test by a group of University of Miami psychologists who studied hundreds of fMRI brain scans, from two separate datasets, to see how the variability of brain signals changes or remains the same during a human lifespan. The UM team analyzed hundreds of brain scans of participants, ranging in age from 6 to 86, who were all in a "resting state," which means they were not engaged in any particular task while in the fMRI scanner. The publicly available data, which is freely available to neuroimaging researchers, was acquired from the Nathan-Kline institute. "Resting state is a misnomer because intrinsically your brain is always doing something. There is always something happening in the brain," said postdoctoral fellow Jason Nomi. "The scans we are looking at represent the baseline variability of ongoing activity in the brain at any given time. No one has really characterized this baseline across the lifespan." Lucina U...