Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection. Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a year’s worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?
While d
ifferent investigators have examined a particular person’s brain activity at different times, no study has examined the patterns of a brain at a twice weekly frequency for a year. Poldrack’s self-tracking study could help fill a gap in the neuroscience community’s understanding of how brain networks act. “We know absolutely nothing about how a healthy brain changes its function and fluctuates over the course of days and weeks and months, and that’s important to know because there are a lot of disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia that show really big fluctuations over the course of weeks and months,” says Poldrack. “This kind of data set—I image myself two to three times a week over a year, that’s 100 to 150 imaging sets of one person—just doesn’t exist,” he says.
