Dr. Mark D'Esposito

Resting state connectivity.

Yeah, they're more independent as opposed to less independent with each other.

Right, right.

Interesting.

So we did a study where we took 12 traumatic brain injury patients and measured their modularity.

So you get a number, you know, you just get a modularity index for each of the 12 people.

And then they underwent this goal management training and we were able to predict who was going to improve on the training.

Those who had more... started off more modular

benefited more from the training and it's turned out that this has been a very robust finding across studies now across different training different young old patient populations it's also predicted things like whether someone in a coma is more likely to do well or if someone who's older is going to have a certain amount of cognitive decline or someone's going to respond to behavioral

therapy if they're obsessive compulsive so there's something about this brain state that not only we can measure but actually is giving us insight into the interventions that we're doing which again is going to be much more helpful in determining what helps and what doesn't help if we know we know sort of what the state is before we start the intervention so interesting and makes me think many things but

Well, you know, yeah, I think modularity can actually be that metric.

Some metric of your large-scale organization of your brain can be that metric.

There's a number of labs that have done this, have measured modularity in real time.

So what I was talking about was just getting a snapshot of this is what your baseline modularity is.

But we can also look at modularity as changes on a second-to-second-to-minute-to-minute basis.

And

One of my former postdocs, Sepera Saragiani, she just did a very simple experiment where there were sounds, and the functional MRI scanner is very loud, so you can't hear very well, but every once in a while there would be a sound that was just above the level of the noise of the scanner, and all you had to do was sort of press a button if you heard that sound.

And you didn't pick it up all the time.

Maybe 80% of the time you heard it,

sometimes 20% of the times you didn't hear it.