It is Ursula's third time using the functional MRI machine. Heather Kosakowski is a PhD student studying cognitive neuroscience and hopes to collect just two minutes of data. Although Ursula was booked for a brain scan lasting two hours, it is not a guarantee. The first two sessions were also for two hours and yielded eight minutes of useful material.This task is almost impossible. Ursula is needed by Kosakowski to remain awake and watch projected images of faces and scenes. Ursula must also be able to stand still for a few seconds, or even minutes. Every wiggle and twitch blurs the MRI scan, making it impossible to see. Ursula, however, tends to squirm, then eventually fall asleep. This is exactly what you would expect for a six-month old baby.It is extremely difficult to scan infants brains in their sleep. There are also risks that the session won't produce any data. An adult who is motivated can hold still for up to two hours and produce brain images that look like a book. Ursula's sessions are more like a book that has been torn up and put in the river. Kosakowski is being advised jointly by cognitive neuroscience professors Nancy Kanwisher 80 (PhD 86) and Rebecca Saxe 03 (PhD 03). She must carefully extract the useful sections and then stitch them together to read the story.Heather is one of the most skilled people alive today in obtaining high-quality functional MRI data for human infants. Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor, Cognitive Neuroscience, said that Heather is among the best.Kosakowski may not get the still brain images she needs. It is possible Ursula's previous visits were in vain. If she is able to get an accurate fMRI reading, she'll be one step closer in answering the greatest question in modern neuroscience: What physical underpinnings are human minds?It's a far-off dreamKosakowski has no problem overcoming obstacles. Her childhood was filled with instability, making higher education seem impossible. Her family was constantly moving around because her father was in the military. After her parents divorced, the problems only got worse. At seven years old, Kosakowski and her mother moved into an abandoned shelter. Kosakowski was placed in foster care in Western Massachusetts at 11. She says that her dream of obtaining a bachelor's degree was always fulfilled, but that her first attempt at college was a failure.After her fMRI scan, Kosakowski was reunited with baby Ursula. RACHEL FRITTSShe recalls that she dropped out of college, was homeless, had no job, and then her car was totaled. Then, she was like "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" She was determined to join the Marine Corps, but she hoped that one day she would get another chance at college.Kosakowski, who had served several years in the Marine Corps, decided to return home and enroll part-time at Massachusetts Bay Community College. Perhaps a bachelor's degree was not so far off after all, she thought. Smith College was her first choice. She was also informed that she was pregnant.Kosakowski did not go to college that fall but she was determined to continue her education. Hannah, Kosakowski's baby girl, was born in October. Hannah is the outlet for her natural curiosity. Hannah was able to experience grass for the first-time in spring and she loved how she responded to the strange material. Kosakowski kept asking Hannah questions about her environment as she explored it. What was she seeing? What was her way of understanding the world around?Hannah Kosakowski was just two years old when she was offered a job with a non-profit that was helping to accelerate research on multiple sclerosis. This gave her the chance to attend a neuroscience conference. She says that she was hooked after that. I thought, "Okay, research is what I want to do." To be able to research, I needed a degree. I need to return to school.Kosakowski was admitted to Wellesley College, a school she had rejected years ago because it was so difficult. After becoming fascinated by neuroscience, she began to ask her professors questions. One of them said, Heather: Some questions you ask are not answered. A PhD is a must.I kept lookingKosakowski graduated at Wellesley. Saxe was searching for a manager to manage her lab. It is the only lab that studies infants in MRIs while they sleep, and therefore can answer Kosakowskis questions regarding the nature of infant cognition. She applied and was granted the job.Kosakowski visited Saxe to learn how to use the FMRI to scan her foster sister's brain. Kosakowski said that she believed she would just scan her niece and then be done. I kept scanning and she never stopped. Saxe was impressed by Kosakowskis hard work and determination and agreed to accept her as a graduate student. She quit her job as lab manager to start her first semester at MIT as a PhD candidate.Kanwisher can still recall the first time Kosakowski scanned a baby using the MRI. Although she had been considering working with Kosakowski or Saxe for their infant study, she was initially skeptical. The kid is screaming like mad. The mom is anxious. It's stressful all around. Heather says that this is not the end. Then boom. The clouds parted, the child smiles, Heather popped the child into the MRI scanner and, like a minute later, she scans beautiful data. It's all about the perseverance and the skill.Kosakowski's current research focuses on the brains and behavior of infants aged two to nine months. It examines how they respond to videos of bodies or faces, and how it differs from how they react to scenes with no people. This is the first time that evidence has been found of this type of specialization in children younger than five years. Only fMRI can provide the information she seeks. Researchers can take high-resolution images of brain cross-sections with magnetic resonance imaging. Functional MRI is a layer that adds an additional layer, recording brain activity in real-time. Blood flow is increased to a particular region of the brain when neurons are active in that section. This is evident in fMRI scans as a bright spot.Researchers have used fMRI for decades to show that certain areas of the adult brain can be highly specialized in order to identify which parts are best suited for specific tasks. All of this structure is found in the brain and mind. We were not simply able to be generally smart. Kanwisher states that we were smart in specific ways about certain things. You can see the structure of the brain. There are dozens of different regions that do very distinct, unique things. It is impossible not to wonder how that structure got wired up.For example, when adults see faces, a part of their brain known as the fusiform facial area (or FFA) lights up. Researchers can place adults in MRI machines, and show them images of faces or objects. The FFA responds only to faces. Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA) responds strongly to scenes. Kanwisher was the one who first discovered the FFA in 1997. She also led the 1998 effort to identify and describe the PPA. In 2001, she and her colleagues discovered the extrastriate brain area (EBA), which strongly responds to images of body parts.Kanwisher says that Heather is scanning the youngest people awake and asking about the structure of the brain. That's not all there is to it in psychology, neuroscience and deep philosophy. What is the structure and origin of our minds?The preliminary results of Kosakowski's study offer some of the strongest evidence that certain functions in our brains may not be learned but are innate. Kosakowski also says that babies have selective responses to faces, bodies and scenes in the FFA and EBA and PPA. This is the first time that this has been done. It was totally unexpected that we would find this.These brain scans were taken from an infant who was watching scenes and videos. Red and yellow indicate activity related to seeing faces, while blue indicates activity related to scenes. HEATHER KOSAKOWSKIHowever, the covid-19 pandemic has presented its own challenges. She had to put off the fMRI sessions and has been spending much of the past year analysing her data at home. Covid-19 has had a profound impact on me as I work from home and am a single parent. It also impacts many families with children, Kosakowski said. Before graduating in May 2022, she hopes to be able to scan more infants and begin to study their auditory processing. Ursula's session in late 2019, however, turns out to be one of her last opportunities to collect valuable data for her dissertation.Ursula fell asleep on the scanner during that session. Kosakowski, however, was upbeat as the session ended. She believed shed had gotten the data, and shed later confirmed her belief. Kosakowski snatched Ursula's baby from her mother and held her while she sat at a computer. Unflappable graduate student is able to keep babies happy, relaxed and healthy. This skill is not taught in a PhD program but it's one that can prove invaluable whenever you have more data.She finally pulled up the image she had been searching for and pointed toward it, Ursula following her gaze. We might one day be able to understand how Ursula saw the image. Kosakowski said it to the baby in her arms. That's your brain!
