ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, JANULLA
The first time Nico Dosenbach read his colleague’s study in 2013, “I knew that I’d been doing neuroscience wrong for a long time,” he says. “It was like an epiphany.” To find out how an individual brain might vary from day to day, Russ Poldrack, then of the University of Texas at Austin, had been scanning himself regularly for a year.
The approach made perfect sense to Dosenbach, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis—rather than pooling data from a whole bunch of people and averaging the results, repeating the same scan on the same brain would allow him to sort signal from noise and get a clearer picture of its organization. Combining data on different people “doesn’t work all that well for figuring out how an individual human brain works,” he says.
Such an undertaking also has its drawbacks. For one, lying motionless in ...
