Introduction: Paranormal beliefs are defined as believing in extrasensory perception, precognition, witchcraft, and telekinesis, magical thinking, psychokinesis, superstitions. Previous studies corroborate that executive brain functions underpin paranormal beliefs. To test causal hypotheses, neurophysiological studies of brain activity are required. Method: A sample of 20 students (10 females,...

With the introduction of electroencephalography (EEG) in 1930, researchers began to explore spontaneous activity in the brain by recording the individual, independently of any task. Subsequently, evoked potential studies, where electrical potentials were recorded at the onset of a stimulus, marked a milestone in brain research. Utilizing such methods coupled with experimental psychology, resear...

The investigation of resting state activity has become an extremely busy topic in neurocognitive research. A recent pubmed search revealed more than 2000 entries for the terms “resting state” AND “fMRI.” Several putative clinical applications have been suggested, such as the detection of early signs of Alzheimer’s disease (e.g., Lustig et al., 2003) or risk of developing psychosis (e.g., Jukuri...

The idea that serious mental illnesses, such as autism and schizophrenia, result fromabnormalconnectivityamong largescale brain networks is gaining widespread acceptance. Efforts to test hypotheses of dysconnectivity have historically been hindered by tools with insufficient spatial resolution to investigatehumanbrain connectivity in vivo and an incomplete understanding of the large-scaleorgani...

Speaker Name: Joshua Shimony, MD, PhD, [email protected] Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA Highlights: -Task based fMRI is an established technique for mapping eloquent cortex. -Resting state fMRI (RS-fMRI) methods are currently under investigation. -The clinical application of RS-fMRI to the mapping of eloquent cortex is a new method under investigation with som...

Despite their name, resting state networks (RSNs) provide a clear indication that the human brain may be hard-working. Unlike the cardiac and respiratory systems, which greatly reduce their rate of function during periods of inactivity, the human brain may have additional responsibilities during rest. One particularly intriguing function performed by the resting brain is the consolidation of re...

Introduction Synchronized low-frequency fluctuations in resting-state fMRI (1) have been used to investigate functional connectivity between brain areas. Recent studies demonstrate that this technique can be utilized in the study of Alzheimer’s disease (2), antidepressant effects (3), and “default mode” of brain networks (4). So far, most resting-state fMRI studies have been performed on humans...

The complexity of the human brain's activity and connectivity varies over temporal scales and is altered in disease states such as schizophrenia. Using a multi-level analysis of spontaneous low-frequency fMRI data stretching from the activity of individual brain regions to the coordinated connectivity pattern of the whole brain, we investigate the role of brain signal complexity in schizophreni...

Context-sensitive and activity-dependent fluctuations in connectivity underlie functional integration in the brain and have been studied widely in terms of synaptic plasticity, learning and condition-specific (e.g., attentional) modulations of synaptic efficacy. This dynamic aspect of brain connectivity has recently attracted a lot of attention in the resting state fMRI community. To explain dy...

Brain tumor patients often experience functional deficits that extend beyond the tumor site. While resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) has been used to map such functional connectivity changes in brain tumor patients, the interplay between abnormal tumor vasculature and the rsfMRI signal is still not well understood. Therefore, there is an exigent need for new tools to elucidate how the blood...