{"id":236483,"date":"2026-05-04T22:09:50","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T03:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ultrafast-mri-uncovers-brain-signal-direction-new-scan-may-help-decode-autism-alzheimers-and-hallucinations"},"modified":"2026-05-04T22:09:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T03:09:50","slug":"ultrafast-mri-uncovers-brain-signal-direction-new-scan-may-help-decode-autism-alzheimers-and-hallucinations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/ultrafast-mri-uncovers-brain-signal-direction-new-scan-may-help-decode-autism-alzheimers-and-hallucinations","title":{"rendered":"Ultrafast MRI uncovers brain signal direction: New scan may help decode autism, Alzheimer\u2019s and hallucinations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ultrafast-mri-uncovers-brain-signal-direction-new-scan-may-help-decode-autism-alzheimers-and-hallucinations2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon have for the first time managed to identify with an imaging technique whether nervous impulses in the brain of rats are flowing in a \u201cbottom-up\u201d (feedforward), carrying information about visual input, or a \u201ctop-down\u201d (feedback) direction, carrying information about expectations or predictions on a given task or about the perception of the world around us. Their results, <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41467-026-71506-9\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Communications<\/i>, could have important implications for understanding changes in the brains of people with hallucinations, Alzheimer\u2019s, schizophrenia, autism, and other conditions.<\/p>\n<p>Joana Carvalho, first author of the new study, who at the time was working in the Preclinical MRI lab led by senior author Noam Shemesh (she has since become a group leader at Coimbra University), \u201ccame up with the ideas, did the experiments and analyzed the results. I just brought the MRI expertise,\u201d says Shemesh good-humoredly. Co-author Koen V. Haak from Tilburg University (Netherlands) gave assistance with the computational models and the others helped with the experiments.<\/p>\n<p>The team showed that spontaneous feedforward and feedback nervous impulses in these rodents (the brain never sleeps) each have a unique, distinct signature, which can be detected by using a method they developed, called uFLARE (UltraFast Layer-Resolved Encoding), a neuroimaging technique designed to map brain activity with unprecedented high temporal and spatial resolutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon have for the first time managed to identify with an imaging technique whether nervous impulses in the brain of rats are flowing in a \u201cbottom-up\u201d (feedforward), carrying information about visual input, or a \u201ctop-down\u201d (feedback) direction, carrying information about expectations or predictions on a given task or about [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}