Dr. Mark D'Esposito

Well, she measured their modularity on a moment-to-moment basis, and she could predict if they were going to get that, if they were going to be correct or not and wreck the sound before they got the sound.

If they were highly modular, boom, they got it.

If their brain had gone into this kind of diffuse, less moderate state, they missed it.

And so I could definitely see, as you're just talking about, where if we could develop a modularity metric in real time,

on a device this would be game changer and so and that's sort of what i'm you know what i've been interested in do what excites me is that we're not going to do with a scan obviously you can't walk around with a scanner in your head right and and even i don't think you could even do with the eg i think can we develop a proxy for modularity with some more simple

way of doing it.

Can we extract this maybe out of heart rate variability or for oxygen?

I've been working with some colleagues, a former student, Brian Miller, and a postdoc of Adam Gazali's, Wes Clapp, who have a company called Neuroscouting,

where they are able to, they have, we've been sort of doing scanning and also collecting physiological data to try and determine if there's some, we can measure the modularity in the scanner, but can we pick that up in the physiology data because they can collect

you know, oxygen and heart rate variability and other metrics that may be kind of a readout of that.

And then we'd have a brain state, which is what you were looking, you know, you're looking for some brain state.

But it's not, I think people are thinking we need a helmet or something like that.

We need just something simple, right, that reads out brain state just the way we read out other physiological information from our watch or something like that.

No, it's just, it has to do with how we make these measurements and connectivity doesn't mean the same, you know, there's different types of connectivity.

And so I like to

When I think about connectivity, we talked about this connectivity of a brain state versus a brain trait.

So when we're talking about you being highly modular as a trait, that's very different than what your modularity is like in different states.

It actually turns out when you do these highly executive things,

demanding tasks, you get less modular because your networks are communicating with each other.

So it's important for networks to get less modular when it's a more demanding task.