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Talairach Lecture
Worldwide Collaboration and Artificial Intelligence in the Global Quest to Map Human Brain Diseases
ENIGMA’s impact extends globally through initiatives such as ENIGMA India, Pakistan, and the ENIGMA-U education program, fostering open collaboration, training, and opportunities for all. In this talk, we will outline major findings to date and examine how AI-driven methods may reshape the landscape of brain research. With generative AI, vision-language models, and multimodal brain decoding, we are on the cusp of new possibilities – from decoding disease mechanisms to designing targeted treatments. The global quest to alleviate brain diseases is within our reach – a collective endeavour that is greatly empowered by the OHBM community, supporting us all in our shared mission to bring life-changing discoveries to all corners of the globe.
For more on how to participate, see: http://enigma.ini.usc.edu
Keynote Speakers
Mechanisms of Mind: Bridging Generative Brain Models and Psychedelic Neuroscience
Understanding how the brain flexibly reconfigures its connectivity across time, space, and context is a major goal in systems neuroscience. In this talk, I will present recent advances in generative modelling of brain connectivity developed to address this challenge using multimodal neuroimaging data. Building on the framework of Dynamic Causal Modelling, I will introduce novel approaches that integrate functional MRI, diffusion imaging, and electrophysiological recordings to infer hidden neuronal states and directed interactions across brain regions. These methods offer a principled way to combine anatomical constraints with dynamic functional measurements, enabling more accurate and mechanistically interpretable models of brain function. I will also briefly describe a complementary foundation model that learns robust, interpretable brain representations by fusing time series, structural, and effective connectivity data using transformer-based architectures.
In the second part of the talk, I will demonstrate the application of these tools to altered states of consciousness, focusing on new findings from PsiConnect, the largest multimodal imaging study to date of the acute psychedelic state. Combining multi-echo fMRI and 64-channel EEG across systematically varied sensory and psychological contexts, we identify a structured shift from sensory-driven to associative cortical processing under psilocybin. Using advanced connectivity analyses and machine learning, we uncover a reproducible neural signature of the psychedelic state that tracks with subjective experience and predicts therapeutically relevant outcomes at the individual level. Contrary to the view of psychedelics as inducing disordered brain activity, our findings reveal a coherent, context-sensitive reorganisation of cortical dynamics. We introduce embeddedness as a mechanistic framework for integrating internal and external perception, offering a novel perspective on how transient altered states can lead to sustained psychological change. Together, this work bridges advances in generative modelling, neuroimaging, and psychedelic science to inform both theories of brain function and the future of personalised mental health interventions.
Consciousness: From Theory to Practice
The Network Illusion in Functional Brain Mapping
Mechanism of functional (dys)connectivity
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Fetal Programming of Maternal Psychological Stress: Implications for Early Brain Development and Mental Health
Towards a universal taxonomy of functional brain networks
While the idea that the human brain is composed of multiple large functional networks has been gaining traction in cognitive and network neuroscience, the field has yet to reach consensus on
several key issues regarding terminology. What constitutes a functional brain network? Are there “core” functional networks, and if so, what are their spatial topographies? What naming conventions, if universally adopted, will provide the most utility and facilitate communication amongst researchers? Can a taxonomy of functional brain networks be delineated? The Workgroup for HArmonized Taxonomy of NETworks (WHATNET) was formed in 2020 as an OHBM–endorsed best practices committee to provide recommendations on points of consensus, identify open questions, and highlight areas of ongoing debate in the service of moving the field toward standardized reporting of network neuroscience results. The group has developed a Network Correspondence Toolbox (NCT) to permit researchers to examine and report spatial correspondence between their novel neuroimaging results and multiple widely used functional brain atlases. The adoption of the NCT will make it easier for researchers to report their findings in a standardized manner, thus aiding reproducibility and facilitating comparisons between studies to produce interdisciplinary insights.
Sharna Jamadar, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University Australia
Glucodynamics and the metabolic network of the human brain
Relative to other organs in the human body, the brain relies upon a large energy budget, which is primarily met through the metabolism of glucose. This reliance on glucose shapes both the anatomical organisation of the brain network as well as its functional efficiency. A reliable and scalable (i.e., able to be up- and down-regulated on demand) supply of glucose is necessary for brain health, and changes in cerebral glucodynamics results in cognitive dysfunction, psychiatric illness and neurodegenerative disease. Coherent glucodynamic signals across the brain form a functional metabolic network that primarily reflects postsynaptic signals of information transfer in the brain.
In this presentation, I will discuss recent advances in understanding the dynamic nature of cerebral glucose metabolism and the metabolic network of the brain. By drawing upon simultaneous PET/MR data, I will demonstrate that the metabolic network of the brain provides unique and complementary insight into the functional organisation of the brain compared to the fMRI-derived functional network. Finally, I will discuss how glucodynamics and the metabolic network of the brain matures across the healthy adult lifespan.
