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P. Read Montague, Jr., PhD, and Ron Fisher, MD, PhD, want to figure out how your mind works. They want to delve into your subconscious to discover which parts of your brain are active during everyday social interactions, and how these processes work together to form the complex "biological computer" that dictates our thoughts and actions.

Members of the team working with the functional MRIs include (from left): Sam McClure, Jason White, Read Montague, Nathan Apple, Philip Baldwin and Jae Shin.

Now they have the equipment to do this at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Montague and Fisher are the Director and Administrative Director, respectively, of the new Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, a facility equipped with two fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machines that will be used exclusively for basic science research. And there is no shortage of ideas about what research can be done.

Having previously done studies on how neurons value and perceive rewarding stimuli that organisms expect to occur in the future, the researchers are now expanding their work to determine how neurons react to anything of value. Montague, a professor in the division of neuroscience, believes that there is an additional sensory outlet called valuation, which is made up of specific neurons just like the other five senses. "What valuation does is exactly what any kind of currency does; it allows you to compare disparate acts and objects which are not mixable."

Montague is applying the principles of valuation to a branch of experimental economics called neural economics. "If economics wants to ever claim to be a science, it can only be about predictions," said Montague. "They are going to have to get empirical, and they are going to have to figure out how to integrate their view of what a market already is with the atomistic units that compose a market - brains." And they have to figure out what in the brain causes people to feel and think and act as they do.

Ron Fisher, PhD

To study on a theoretical and computational level how people interact in situations such as the stock market, Montague's group develops algorithms to describe human behavior. They then combine these representations of "brains and decision makers" into an aggregate to determine how people might act, especially in response to social situations.

To study problems like these on a biological level, however, they had to come up with a novel experimental design that could encompass and measure the interactions of a group. The result was hyperscanning, a software program that allows researchers to remotely control experiments involving two or more people interacting via computer or some other device, while being simultaneously scanned by the fMRI machines. The images produced by fMRI scanners show regions of increased blood flow to the brain, a demonstration of increased neural activity.

"We're interested in whether there are concurrently active structures during certain elements of the exchange," explained Montague. "The dynamics of social interactions don't exist in just one brain. They exist between the two brains."

Hyperscanning allows the researchers to create physiological snapshots of what is happening in the mind of a subject who is listening or observing, an essential part of any interaction.

One of the questions Montague would like to investigate with this new technology is how people develop a conceptualization of the minds of others. "One of the features of autism is that the children have either impoverished or nonexistent models of other people's emotional states," said Montague. Because of this, he would like to use fMRI images to study the responses of autistic and normal children to various group interactions.

"Almost every syndrome in psychiatry that you can name is characterized by perturbed social interactions," said Montague. "Patients do all these things that are inappropriate with respect to the algorithms running through everybody's head." By studying social algorithms, he hopes to shed some light on standard human interactions, and how these are affected in various diseases.

While social interactions and valuation have obvious evolutionary basis - you need the help of others and basic cost/benefit analysis skills to be successful, the underlying reason for other intrinsic human behaviors may not be so obvious.

Fisher, an assistant professor in the division of neuroscience, is studying the neuronal basis of what he terms the "aesthetic manipulation of the environment." With practically any manmade object, he said, people spend significant amounts of time and money on making it look pretty, even though doing so may have no functional value at all.

"We're always changing the color and shape and form of our environment to please us and to attract other people," said Fisher. "It's a biological behavior, and the question is what in the brain, which neural pathways, are causing this behavior to occur."

In other words, why do we go into the stores with bright flashy signs, take the time in the morning to make sure that our clothes match, or linger by favorite paintings in a museum?

Fisher is just beginning his research on this innate desire for aesthetics, a novel field, with experiments designed to answer that last question. While subjects are in the fMRI scanner, he presents them with slides of 80 different paintings, representing all styles of Western art in works that date from the 11th century to the end of the 20th century. After the images of their neural reaction are captured, the subjects are removed from the scanner and asked whether they like each of the paintings.

The researchers then compared the brain activity that occurred when people saw paintings they liked to brain activity that occurred when they saw paintings they disliked.

Although the results are still preliminary and based only on a few subjects, what they are finding is surprising. Instead of finding differences in the cortex, the region of the brain responsible for the complex thought processes, the only neural activity they found that was specific to enjoyment of the paintings was in the midbrain and the ventral striatum. These two structures are highly evolutionarily conserved and even found in reptiles. They are involved in the dopamine reward pathway previously implicated in cocaine addiction.

"The preliminary results are suggesting that the big difference between looking at a painting you like and one you don't like is this deep primitive reptilian pleasure response," said Fisher. "People who love art claim they get all this pleasure from it. It's somewhat analogous to the pleasure that results when you give cocaine to people, though you can safely assume at a much lower level."

The enjoyment of art then appears to begin with an unconscious, primal process that activates a known reward pathway. "Perhaps only afterwards you come up with an conscious explanation of why you felt this pleasure," hypothesizes Fisher. "It seems that your conscious cortex continually fabricates explanations for everything it sees around you, especially your own behavior."

This rationalizing is a well-established phenomenon. Previous psychological studies have shown that if people can't explain why they did something, they will not only make up a reason, but also believe it to true. However, with the new neuroimaging technology now in place, it may become more difficult to make excuses, consciously or otherwise.

(Note: Kate Ramsayer, a graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts and currently enrolled in a science-writing program at University of California at Santa Cruz, was a science-writing intern at Baylor in the summer of 2002).

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