This weekend Milwaukee is the site of a major conference on the brain, drawing hundreds of brain researchers, according to the Journal Sentinel. http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/103169729.html
The Second International Conference on Resting-State Functional Brain Connectivity is chaired by Christopher Pawela, who is a researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where the confab is being held. The fancy name of the conference simply refers to the study of the brain at rest, inactive, an area that has become a hot topic of interest in neuroscience.
For example, there have been studies on whether a person in a coma is aware and whether his or her brain responds to voice and touch.
This area of research has just gotten a boost from the National Institutes of Health, which have just given out $40 million in grants to fund research to create high resolution maps of the brain. The grants are going to two research groups: Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who have teamed up; and Harvard University and UCLA.
Wisconsin has helped lead the way in some of this research, particulary that relating to magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. In 1995 the Medical College of Wisconsin used resting-state functional MRI to be among the first to demonstrate that the brain is never truly at rest.
Researchers are banking that testing the brain while it is at rest, and finding abnormalities, can potentially lead to the early diagnosis of maladies such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder and Alzheimer’s disease.
