It is widely known that the brain perceives information before it reaches a person’s awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.

That has changed with the findings of scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles who have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person’s mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness.

As reported in the Oct. 2009 issue of Psychological Science, the findings obtained by Stephen José Hanson, psychology professor at Rutgers; Russell A. Poldrack, professor at UCLA, and Yaroslav Halchenko, (now a post-doctoral student at Dartmouth College), have provided direct evidence that a person’s mental state can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The research also suggests that a more comprehensive approach is needed for mapping brain activity and that the widely held belief that localized areas of the brain are responsible for specific mental functions is misleading and incorrect.

Over the last several years, much of neuroimaging has focused on pinpointing areas of the brain that are uniquely responsible for specific mental functions, such as learning, memory, fear and love. But this latest research shows that the brain is more complex than that simple model.

In their analysis of global brain activity, the researchers found that different processing tasks have their own distinct pattern of neural connections stretching across the brain, similar to the fingerprints that distinctively identify each of us. Rather than being a static pattern, however, the brain is able to arrange and rearrange the connections based on the mental task being undertaken.

“You can’t just pinpoint a specific area of the brain, for example, and say that is the area responsible for our concept of self or that part is the source of our morality,” says Hanson. “It turns out the brain is much more complex and flexible than that. It has the ability to rearrange neural connections for different functions. By examining the pattern of neural connections, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy what mental processing task a person is doing.“

The findings open up the possibility of categorizing a multitude of mental tasks with their unique pattern of neural circuitry and also represent a potential first, early step in developing a means for identifying higher-level mental functions, such as 'lying' or abstract reasoning. They potentially also could pave the way for earlier diagnosis and better treatment of mental disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, by offering a means for identifying very subtle abnormalities in brain activity and synchrony.

The research showing that specific mental functions do not correspond directly with certain brain areas but rather a unique pattern of neural connections also provides a more accurate direction for mapping the effective connectivity of the brain. Known as the Connectome Project, the goal of researchers involved in that work is to provide a complete map of the neural circuitry of the central nervous system.

Source: Rutgers University