Brain Waves

When you're staring into space, you may not think that there is much going on upstairs. In reality, functional MRI has shown us that brain areas are always communicating with each other, even at rest. These coordinated patterns of activity could also be hiding clues about how we function as individuals. For example, there's less coordinated brain activity at rest in people with autism (fewer red clusters in the bottom row) compared to individuals without autism (top). Neuroscientists have recently gone one step further to show that as symptoms of the disorder become more severe, including intellectual difficulties and repetitive behaviours, this activity in key brain areas is even less coordinated. If neural patterns are related to or even causing the complex behavioural symptoms we see in individuals with autism, in future we may be able to treat the disorder by looking at how to change such patterns.

Written by Gaëlle Coullon

Gaëlle Coullon

Writer

Gaëlle is a consultant and trainer in research communication and commercialisation. As an ex-neuroscientist, she is always looking for new ways to combine her love of writing with everything brain related.

• Image from work by Takamitsu Watanabe, Geraint Rees and Naoki Masuda
• Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London and Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, February 2019