Goal: The purpose of this task is simply to experience some Big Data from the perspective of the brain, navigate Neurosynth, and explore some of your own questions with the system.
As you know from last week, Neurosynth is a system that has collected "big data" on the brain by aggregating a huge number of studies published in science articles. It makes these data available all together in one tool you can navigate in your browser! Click here to navigate to Neurosynth in a separate window. Click on the "Studies" menu item along the top of the page. These are the studies that Neurosynth has used to extract what brain areas are active for what "key words" or terms that occur in these papers. In other words, Neurosynth allows you to correlate what brain areas are activated and what words are used in papers -- and of course these words can be used as proxies for "cognitive processes" that we might want to study.
Quick task: Click on one of the studies and see the activations that were reported in the study (which Neurosynth has extracted for us). Now click on the "terms" too -- you can see what words occur in those articles.
Let's start simple. On the top menu of Neurosynth, click "Meta-analyses" and then choose "Terms." This will show you a huge list of words you can peruse. When clicking on a word, it will show you an analysis of what brain areas (what coordinates) tend to show activation across the number of studies that contain that word (or phrase). Use this tool to look up the following terms. For each term, identify which lobe appears to have the most activity. Use this figure as a reference for the lobes.
visual
motor
language
social
reasoning
Final question: Which of these processes more pervasively involves different brain areas -- which is more "spread out"? Which one did you expect might be more "spread out" in the brain?
(Note: It's okay just to use the default settings on Neurosynth for your exploration. For example, just leave the "reverse inference" option on for now. Do remember that we discussed forward vs. reverse in lecture though.)
Now browse the terms for Neurosynth and find one that interests you. Make sure that this term is found in over 100 studies (otherwise you cannot confidently estimate brain activations). How does it compare to the activations in the previous Step 2? Does it involve activation in many lobes? Is it surprising how little activation there seems to be for that term? In a few words briefly describe what you find.
