A summary of recent work

It’s been a while since I updated the website so here a brief overview of some of our labs work. Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve been up to:

Measuring brain chemistry during tasks

Our fMRI work is kicking off and we’ve been exploring whether we can track rapid changes in brain chemistry as people do different tasks. In one study, we tested whether we could measure GABA and glutamate responses while people viewed social stimuli. This was tricky and the signals we picked up seemed to reflect general visual processing rather than social processing specifically. This helped us design our analysis approaches though.

Building on this, we also published a new paper (coming out in Communications Biology) that uses a sensory task showing that tactile stimulation induces GABA and Glx associated changes in the brain, associated with perceptual performance.

Getting the methods right

We continue to do some MRS methods work. We recently published a methods paper examining whether different MRS measures give you the same answers when measuring glutamate. We found that measurements from HERMES (a technique we often use for GABA) and PRESS (a standard technique) don’t agree with each other, even though they’re measuring the same brain regions. T

How brain chemistry changes as we grow

We published two papers looking at how brain chemistry develops from childhood through adulthood. In the first, we tracked several key brain chemicals across the lifespan and found that GABA and glutamate levels decrease steeply during childhood then stabilize in adulthood albeit differently so. Choline and creatine, on the other hand, increase during development which impacts quantification. Interestingly, we also found that GABA levels relate to memory performance.

In a follow-up study (now in Imaging Neuroscience), we looked at how these brain chemicals relate to the physical structure of the brain. We found that glutamate levels are linked to cortical thickness and folding patterns in the brain’s outer layer. This suggests that the chemistry and structure of the brain develop together in coordinated ways but also impacts tissue correction for MRS.

Autism and brain chemistry: what do we really know?

We recently published a comprehensive review pulling together all the existing MRS research on brain chemistry in autism. Wefound that autistic people tend to have lower GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter) and NAA in their brains. These differences are most pronounced in children and in limbic regions. Importantly, we also showed how study design and methodological choices affect what researchers find, highlighting the need for more standardized approaches in this field.

Understanding social touch

Finally, we explored why some people find social touch pleasant while others don’t. Using a combination of vibrotactile perception tests and a novel touch paradigm, we studied adults in both the UK and Singapore. We discovered that people with poorer tactile discrimination abilities rated social touch as less pleasant – and this pattern held across both cultures. This suggests that basic sensory processing differences might help explain individual variations in how people experience social contact.