Brain Imaging May Help Predict Future Behavior

An article published in the journal Neuron highlights a number of recent studies showing that brain imaging can help predict an individual’s future learning, criminality, health-related behaviors and response to drug or behavioral treatments. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge describe the predictive power of brain imaging across a variety of different future behaviors, including infants’ later performance in reading; students’ later performance in math; criminals’ likelihood of becoming repeat offenders; adolescents’ future drug and alcohol use; and addicts’ likelihood of relapse. “Presently, we often wait for failure, in school or in mental health, to prompt attempts to help but by then a lot of harm has occurred,” said one of the study’s researchers. “If we can use neuroimaging to identify individuals at high risk for future failure, we may be able to help those individuals avoid such failure altogether.” To read more about this study, click here.