Unraveling the Brain’s Process for Predicting the Future



Associate Professor Jeffrey M. Zacks studies
 the brain’s process for predicting the future. (David Kilper)


Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now researchers are unraveling the process by which the brain makes these prognostications.

Predicting the near future is vital in guiding behavior, says Jeffrey M. Zacks, PhD, associate professor of psychology.

“It’s valuable to be able to run away when the lion lunges at you, but it’s ­super valuable to be able to hop out of the way before the lion jumps,” he says.

Zacks and his colleagues believe that a good part of predicting the future is maintaining a mental model of what is happening now. Occasionally this model needs updating, especially when the environment changes unpredictably.

In the study, volunteers watched movies of everyday events such as washing a car or building a LEGO model. When researchers stopped the movie, participants predicted what would happen next.

Sometimes the movie stopped when a new occurrence was about to take place. Other times, the researchers stopped the movie in the middle of an event. They found that participants correctly ­predicted activity within the event more than 90 percent of the time; they correctly predicted across the event boundary less than 80 percent of the time.

Zacks says the experiments offer hope of targeting prediction-based ­updating mechanisms to better diagnose early stage neurological diseases and provide tools to help patients.

Read more about this study in the university’s Newsroom

World’s largest hunk of cancer genome data released

To speed progress against cancer and other diseases, the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital-Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project has announced the largest release to date of comprehensive human cancer genome data for free access by the global scientific community.

The amount of information released more than doubles the volume of high-coverage, whole-genome data currently available from all human genome sources combined. This information is valuable not just to cancer researchers, but also to scientists studying almost any disease.

The release of this data was announced as a part of a perspective published online May 29 in Nature Genetics.

The 520 genome sequences released are matched sets of normal and tumor tissue samples from 260 pediatric cancer patients. The Pediatric Cancer Genome Project is expected to sequence more than 1,200 genomes by year’s end. Each sample is sequenced at a quality control level known as 30-fold coverage, ensuring maximum accuracy. The St. Jude and Washington University researchers are analyzing the genomic sequences to determine the differences between each child’s normal and cancerous cells to pinpoint the causes of more than a half-dozen of the most deadly childhood cancers, an effort which has already produced a number of key discoveries reported in top scientific journals.
 
“This effort has generated more discoveries than we thought possible,” says James Downing, MD, St. Jude scientific director who leads the project at St. Jude. “We want to make this information available to the broader scientific community so that, collectively, we can explore new treatment options for these children. By sharing the information even before we analyze it ourselves, we’re hoping that other researchers can use this rich resource for insights into many other types of diseases in children and adults,” he said.

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