many neurologic and psychiatric symptoms correspond to networks of connected regions, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported in December 2018.
The human connectome is a new resource derived from the functional neuro-imaging of thousands of healthy persons, and provides a map of these brain connections. Lesions in different locations that cause the same symptom can now be linked to common networks in ways not previously possible. This approach is called lesion network mapping. These connections may expose new treatment targets for patients with complex neurological and psychiatric symptoms.
Previously, single lesion analysis gave us the information on which to discover the function of various parts of the brain. The well known case of Phineas Gage, as discussed in my book How the Brain Thinks, spotlighted the function of the frontal cortex in behaviours such as apathy, agresssion or social dis-inhibition.
But similar symptoms can be caused by lesions in different areas, and there are disadvantages in functional neuro-imaging. Combining lesion location and its locus in a connected network is an advance over functional neuro-imaging.
Now a recent article in Science is providing even more detail about the complex organ that is the mammalian cerebral cortex, a complex network of neuronal processes that are long and thin, branching, and densely packed. Advanced automated imaging and analysis tools have been used to reconstruct with high spatial resolution the morphological features of 89 neurons and their connections in the mouse barrel cortex. This approach revealed information about the connectivity of inhibitory and excitatory synapses of corticocortical as well as excitatory thalamocortical connections.
We are getting closer.
Merry Christmas everyone.
See you in the New Year.
