The research was undertaken by the University of Oxford’s Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB). It took a large sample of 461 individuals, and crossed them with 280 behavioral traits, as well as demographic, traits – including language, vocabulary, education, income and others.
Strong correspondence between a set of brain links and positive lifestyle/ behaviour traits http://t.co/T6uPlytCfc pic.twitter.com/X7fUZvSZkI
— Oxford University (@UniofOxford) September 29, 2015
The initiative was part of the $30 million Human Connectome Project (HCP), funded by the US National Institutes of Health, aimed at studying the neural pathways of the brain. In this particular study, the Oxford team wished to create an average map of the brain’s processes.
“You can think of it as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from each other,” Professor Stephen Smith of Oxford University, said.
“Then, we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant.”
The resulting maps, which the scientists called connectomes, included 280 behavioral and demographic traits for each subject. Compiling all data, a ‘canonical correlation analysis’ was able to establish correlations between the two data sets.