How MRI Makes the Brain Visible

Abstract

The understanding of the human brain is one of the main scientific challenges of the twenty-first century: Unravel the biological mechanisms of our mental life; Replicate cerebral functional features in artificial systems; Understand neurological or psychiatric diseases to allow early diagnosis and treatment of patients, especially for aging populations; Improve our cognitive performances, education, neuronal bases of cultural and social behaviors, etc. In this quest of the human brain neuroimaging, and especially Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), has become an inescapable pathway, because it allows getting maps of brain structure and function in situ, non-invasively, in patients or normal volunteers of any age. MRI allows brain anatomy of individuals to be visualized in 3 dimensions with great details, as well as networks of brain regions activated by high order cognitive functions up to consciousness, together with stunning images of the connections between those areas. An important challenge for neuroimaging is to push its current limits as far as possible to make the brain visible at spatial and temporal scales which may give access to a neural code. One may gain the necessary increase in the spatial and temporal resolution of the images by boosting the magnetic field MRI, and ouststanding instruments operating to field of 11.7 teslas or above are emerging. Such instruments will not only allow us to “better” see inside our brain, confirming or invalidating our current assumptions on how it works, but also to generate new assumptions, today impossible to anticipate, to help us decode the functioning of our brain.