'She's now the doyenne of network science.” A Ph.D. physicist and MacArthur fellow by 32, Danielle Bassett has pioneered the use of concepts from physics and math to describe the dynamic connections in the human brain. BrainAwarenessWeek NewsfromScience
At age 16, Danielle Bassett spent most of her day at the piano, trying to train her fingers and ignoring a throbbing pain in her forearms. She hoped to pursue a career in music and had been assigning herself relentless practice sessions. But the more she rehearsed Johannes Brahms's feverishon her family's Steinway, the clearer it became that something was wrong. Finally, a surgeon confirmed it: Stress fractures would force her to give up the instrument for a year.
Other projects focus on a theme that has captivated her since her childhood passion for books and the piano: learning and mastery. Bassett wants to find ways to optimize learning by using networks to represent both the brain and the material it learns.
Bassett is part of a generation of physicists and mathematicians who are betting on new theories to capture the brain's higher-order organization."They [have] the math to back them up … and that just brings tremendous power to the biological scene," Gazzaniga says."The great advances in science come from trespassing," he adds, paraphrasing pioneering psychologist Wolfgang Köhler."And Dani is a trespasser.
After Bassett's hiatus from the piano, her father allowed her to attend nursing school."He had finally given me a little bit of room, and I figured I should take it," she says. Researchers first calculate the relationships between all nodes in a network: in the simplest case, either a zero or a one .
In one study, Bassett analyzed MRI data from people with and without schizophrenia. The condition seems to arise from broadly disorganized brain activity, not a defect in any one region. Bassett and colleagues showed that graph theory offered a new way to describe that disorganization.
The research, published in 2011, hinted that measurable, predictable features of the brain's configuration can prime it for learning. That"started to get a lot of people's attention," Bassett says, including representatives of the MacArthur Fellows Program, who pointed to the work in selecting Bassett for the 2014 award. Bassett, who was just getting her lab at UPenn off the ground, found herself in the academic spotlight.
Still, Zorzi says,"It's not ready yet." To develop stimulation protocols based on control theory,"we just need much more theoretical work," he says. That work should include studying how many points of stimulation are necessary to induce a desired brain state, he adds.
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