Jack Gallant - Working toward a complete functional atlas of the human brain

The Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth presents:
Working toward a complete functional atlas of the human brain

Given by Jack Gallant - Chancellor's Professor of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley

Abstract
The structure and function of the human brain are very closely linked. Neuroanatomists have made much progress in obtaining good anatomical parcellations of the human brain and recent technical advances might make it possible to recover detailed structural topography and structural connectivity from living individuals. In contrast, cognitive neuroscientists have made much less progress in obtaining a detailed functional parcellation of the human brain, and most of the studies that have attempted to do this have been based on passive resting state correlations that have no clear functional assignment. My laboratory is engaged in a broad effort to obtain a detailed functional percolation of the human brain that reveals how sensory and cognitive features are represented across the cortical mantle; to understand how these representations are modulated by to-down processes such as attention, learning and memory; and to determine the correspondence between functional and structural neuroanatomy. In this talk I will discuss our approach to this problem, and I will provide a few clear examples showing how this approach reveals detailed functional maps in individual brains. Finally, I will show how these results suggest that we should revise several commonly held beliefs about the functional organization and the operation of the human brain.