A team of scientists led by the University’s Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain has investigated the connections in the brains of 461 people and compared them with 280 different behavioural and demographic measures that were recorded for the same participants.
The quality of the imaging data is really unprecedented. Not only is the number of subjects we get to study large, but the spatial and temporal resolution of the fMRI data is way ahead of previous large datasets.
- Professor Stephen Smith
They found that variation in brain connectivity and an individual’s traits lay on a single axis - where those with classically positive lifestyles and behaviours had different connections to those with classically negative ones. The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience.
The team used data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a $30m brain imaging study funded by the US National Institutes of Health and led by Washington, Minnesota and Oxford Universities.