Researchers from Ben-Gurion University have shown that every adult has a unique brain reliability. This finding and others, which were published in the journal eNeuro, promise better identification and more accurate assessment of severity for neurological and psychiatric disorders, including autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Most people assume that their brain is a stable and reliable tool that works consistently. But amazingly, our brain responses are very different from each other. Even when we see the same object over and over again, our brain reacts in a different way each time, the variation is surprising in its magnitude (variation is the opposite of reliability). Even more surprising is that each of us has a different level of variability/reliability that characterizes us throughout most of our adult lives.
"Some of us have a brain that works in a more reliable and stable way than others. This reliability can be measured when we record the brain responses of adults using the EEG imaging method" explains the head of the research team and manager The Autism Center in the Negev, Prof. Ilan Dinstein, "The fascinating fact is that the degree of reliability of the brain is a very stable characteristic of every person regardless of the task he performs, that is, whether he performs one task or another. In addition, this characteristic, mental reliability, is very consistent over time - even when we examined the same subjects a year apart, the indices were almost identical for each subject. All the findings lead to the conclusion that, for better or worse, each of us has a brain with a specific level of reliability."
Until recently, most scientists in the world thought that brain reliability depended mainly on the extent to which attention was directed to the task being performed. Dinstein and the research team show that the degree of attention is a negligible factor compared to the person's identity, which is the main factor.
"The interesting question is whether people with greater brain reliability have different abilities than those with lower brain reliability," says Dinstein. "For example, in a previous study we showed that people with higher brain reliability were able to identify visual stimuli more accurately. On the other hand, other animal studies show that too much reliability probably leads to fixation, inability to change, problems in learning new skills and adapting behavior to unfamiliar situations. We plan to test this topic in humans in further studies in our laboratory."
"At the same time, we are using EEG recordings during sleep among young children in order to examine whether low brain reliability is an early marker for the development of autism. We hope that these findings can help in the early and accurate diagnosis of the neurological problem in at least some cases of autism. As we know, there are all kinds of autism and it is a very heterogeneous syndrome. However, we hope that understanding the brain activity in autism will allow us to develop and test specific treatments within the framework of the Center for Autism in the Negev" according to Dinstein.
Dinstein and the two female students, the doctoral student Ayelet Arzi and the postdoctoral student Dr. Gil Gonen-Yakobi, published their findings in eNeuro - the new flagship journal of the International Association for Neuroscience.
In a published study, 24 subjects completed two sessions - separated by a year. Each session consisted of four EEG experiments that differed in structure, stimuli, attention demands and cognitive loads. In the first experiment, the task was easy - the subjects passively observed a chessboard-style ring in successive steps. In the second experiment, the task was a little more demanding - the subjects were required to press a button in response to a circle-shaped stimulus and another button in response to a triangle-shaped stimulus. In the third experiment, the demands of the task were increased and the subjects were required to respond only to stimuli in the shape of a circle and not to respond to stimuli in the shape of a triangle (a task requiring inhibition/delay). In the last experiment, the demands of the task were high - the subjects were required to identify whether the current stimulus (a Chinese character) was the same as the stimulus presented two steps earlier. These four tasks allowed the researchers to demonstrate their findings in a generalized way. Individual subjects displayed nearly identical brain reliability regardless of the demands of the task they were performing, and even after a full year had passed.
Dinstein is a member ofDepartment of Psychology And bDepartment of Neuroscience and Cognition As well as at the Zolotovsky Center for Brain Research at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. He is also the director of the Autism Center in the Negev. Arzi is a member of the Department of Neuroscience and Cognition, as well as the Zolotovsky Center for Brain Research. Gonen-Yakobi is a member of the psychology department.
One response
The feature of getting identical results in different measurements is called reliability and unreliability. The word reliability is interpreted as an operation with a minimum of faults. I'm guessing this is an inaccurate translation from English.