The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist

A neuroscientist is getting a brain scan twice every week for a year to try to see how neural networks behave over time.

Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection. Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a years worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?