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_{Oct. 20, 2024}

Decoding mental health

Computational neuroscientist P. Read Montague Jr. poses an unassuming question filled with hidden complications: “When you’re deciding whether to turn left or right, or to eat the chocolate cake or the carrots, what’s happening in your brain?” It’s a simple question on the surface, but it masks a complex web of brain activity. Underlying our decisions and behavior — the ‘‘software’’ — are hidden biological processes that make up the  ‘‘hardware’’ of the brain. Understanding these processes is key to unraveling not just the roots of human behavior, but also the core elements of medical issues such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease. “It might seem like we are desperately trying to get inside people’s heads,” said Montague, director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research and the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, “but we aim to understand why people do things that simply can’t be gleaned from observing their behavior. We want to measure it.”