Noninvasive brain imaging has led to a number of discoveries about the human brain. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reviewed studies about brain imaging and how it has the potential to predict future behavior and response to treatment, publishing the results of their work in the journal Neuron.
John Gabrieli of MIT in Cambridge and colleagues detail the predictive power brain imaging has using a variety of examples like student performance in math and science, infant reading performance, the likelihood that criminals will become repeat offenders as well as the likelihood of relapse in addicts, and future alcohol and drug use in adolescents.
"Presently, we often wait for failure, in school or in mental health, to prompt attempts to help, but by then a lot of harm has occurred. If we can use neuroimaging to identify individuals at high risk for future failure, we may be able to help those individuals avoid such failure altogether," explained Gabrieli.
Researchers, however, are concerned that predicting behavior through brain imaging may raise societal and ethical issues. They reiterated that knowledge of future behavior is best utilized for personalizing medical and educational practices. Rather than just identifying those who are likely or unlikely to succeed, information can be used for providing more help to those who would need it, instead of simply focusing on those who would bring more returns.
Brain imaging is a noninvasive method that measures activity in the brain. For instance, fMRI can measure activity that is connected to blood flow changes that happen in response to activity in the brain. The review also included studies that used electroencephalography, which measures electrical activity by collecting data gathered by electrodes attached to the scalp.
Some of the studies included in the review include one from 2007 that focused on trends in struggling readers and another from 2011 about children with dyslexia. The former showed that brain measures corresponded to stronger forecasts of which children would improve over a one-year period while the latter noted that brain measures were 72 percent accurate in predicting which children will slope off or decline over the course of the study.
Studies reviewed used modest population sizes, and researchers want to conduct larger studies first before effectively recommending brain imaging as a way to predict behavior in the future, although results have been promising.
Other authors for the review include: Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a brain research scientist, and Satrajit Ghosh, a brain imaging research scientist. Gabrieli is a neuroscience professor from MIT.
